Joe Biden will propose $32 billion in spending on law enforcement in his budget, to prove that the Democrat’s flirtation with the “Defund the Police” movement is over.
Will the voters believe him and the other Democrats who are trying to evade responsibility for enabling the “Defund the Police” movement, which not only made America’s cities far less safe but endangered the lives of police officers?
Related: Democrats Aren’t Getting a Mulligan on Defunding the Police
Biden risks an open break with the radicals on this issue. But a close examination of the $32 billion shows that programs near and dear to the hearts of radical leftists will receive a lot of the funding, as will the anti-gun lobby.
The expanded discretionary spending would increase resources for federal prosecutors and give additional resources to state and local law enforcement to put more police on the beat.
It would more than double the funding for community policing through the COPS Hiring Program. It also would add $500 million for so-called community violence interventions — a tenfold increase.
It would pay for nearly 300 new deputy marshals and related personnel.
It would pay for 140 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) agents and investigators working on gun-trafficking strike forces in five major U.S. cities; and 160 ATF investigators working on gun-dealer compliance.
It would significantly increase funds for law enforcement agencies to trace firearms found at crime scenes.
Biden’s budget would increase funds for community violence interventions by a factor of ten, even though there is little or no real-world evidence these programs decrease violence or save lives in any appreciable numbers. But they’re all the rage among the “Defund the Police” crowd, as are other mental health and social work initiatives that put money into questionable and unproven ways of attacking violent crime.
While Biden’s budget beefs up spending for police, he hasn’t entirely broken with people on the “defund” side of the debate. As plenty of them have long demanded, he supports shifting resources around from law enforcement toward mental health and social work. The Washington Post’s Cleve Wootson asked about “alternative forms of crime prevention – not just defunding the police, but crime reduction in communities” at Biden’s news conference.
In response, Biden said that there should be a “significant amount” of those alternatives; he specifically said police departments “need psychologists in the department as much as they need extra rifles” and that “they need social workers engaged with them”. It’s unlikely that the president and the Squad will come to any agreement about police funding, but they might at least find some common ground here.
The gangbangers are quaking in their boots, reading about Biden shifting resources toward mental health and social work. In fact, for people living in the shooting galleries of Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., very little will change. Although they will probably appreciate the psychologists counseling them when their innocent little boy or girl is killed in a gang crossfire.
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