In the wake of the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, Joe Biden called for cities and states to invest their leftover stimulus money on strengthening law enforcement.
“I’m encouraging every mayor, governor to use the American resource money they have, and they have it now, you spend it now, this summer, when crime historically spikes,” Biden said, speaking at the National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service.
Biden cited the shooting during his speech and sought to distance himself from the defund the police movement.
“Folks the answer is not to abandon the streets, it’s not to choose between safety and equal justice, and we should agree it’s not to defund the police, it’s to fund the police,” Biden said. “Fund them with the resources, training they need to protect our communities and themselves and restore trust among the police and the people.”
Biden also added that suicide was the second leading cause of death of officers (after COVID) in 2021 and said police officers need more mental health help.
“We expect you to be everything. We expect everything of you,” Biden said of officers. “Being a cop today is a heck of a lot harder than it’s ever been.”
He should know. His party has been attacking the police for years. Biden himself joined in on it. In July 2020, during an interview with activist Ady Barkan, he admitted he wanted to defund the police by “redirecting” funding to other programs. In the same interview, Biden said that the police “become the enemy.”
While some have claimed that defunding the policing means abolishing the police, according to the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank, “‘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.”
Not only did Biden support defunding the police, but he also has embraced soft-on-crime policies, like ending cash bail, which has contributed to sharp increases in crime nationwide.
In fact, on Biden’s watch, law enforcement deaths hit a record high.
“In 2021, estimates range from 358 to 477 officers killed in the line of duty,” Just the News reported in December. “Both numbers are still significantly higher than in previous years. Using preliminary data, compared to 2020, firearms-related fatalities are up 31% and traffic-related fatalities are up 30%.”
The increase comes following a wave of law enforcement resignations in the aftermath of the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020.
The radical left-wing of the Democratic Party pushed Biden to embrace the defund the police movement. However, it quickly became a political liability for him in 2020. Trump ended up getting the endorsement of key police unions like the New York Police Union, the Fraternal Order of Police, and the nation’s largest police union. Biden also lost the endorsement of the National Association of Police Organizations, which had endorsed him in past elections.
While it’s undeniably a good thing that Biden is (at least publicly) supporting police again, it seems like he’s desperately trying to rewrite history in the hope that Americans will forget how he cozied up to the defund the police movement and Black Lives Matter.
