On Thursday, Joe Biden delivered a speech at NYPD headquarters in New York City to promote his administration’s efforts to reduce gun violence.
During his speech, he attempted to memory hole his past support for the defund the police movement by telling New York City Mayor Eric Adams, “You and I agree, the answer is not to abandon our streets, that’s not the answer.”
“The answer is to come together, police and communities, building trust and making us all safer. The answer is not to defund the police, it’s to give you the tools, the training, the funding to be partners, to be protectors, and the community needs you,” Biden said.
“We’re not about defunding,” Biden insisted, “we’re about funding and providing the additional services you need beyond someone with a gun strapped to their shoulder.”
It’s hard not to see how desperately Biden is trying to rewrite history and repackage himself as a stalwart supporter of the police when he is not.
The fact is that Biden did call for the defunding of police in the summer of 2020 during an interview with liberal activist Ady Barkan. During the interview, Biden was asked, “Do we agree that we can redirect some of the [police] funding?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Biden said.
Some have argued that redirecting funds from the police isn’t the same as “defunding the police.” At the time, Biden’s supporters argued that “defund the police” meant “abolish the police,” but according to a poll, only 18 percent of voters believed that. Further, even the Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank, acknowledged that “‘defund the police’ means reallocating or redirecting funding away from the police department to other government agencies funded by the local municipality. That’s it. It’s that simple. Defund does not mean abolish policing.”
Biden’s embrace of the defund the police movement was politically costly. Trump won the endorsement of key police unions like the New York police union and the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union. Biden also lost the endorsement of the National Association of Police Organizations, which had previously endorsed him in past elections. Even the Delaware Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Trump.
When it became clear that the defund the police movement was politically toxic, Biden quickly sought to distance himself from it and tried to flip the script by falsely claiming Trump was the one who wanted to defund the police. It didn’t work.
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In fact, Biden blamed public support for the “defund the police” movement for the Democrats’ shellacking down-ballot in the 2020 elections. But he didn’t have an epiphany that it was terrible policy. Nope. In fact, he urged liberal civil rights leaders not to put public pressure on his incoming administration regarding police reform until after the Georgia Senate runoff elections because he didn’t want to risk being linked to the defund the police agenda.
Biden knows his poll numbers are bad and that “defunding the police” is political poison, yet his desperate attempts to separate himself from the movement he embraced is blatant deception.
