A trio of Georgia sheriffs on Tuesday spoke out against Democrats that have backed the controversial “defund the police” movement, labeling the push as “crazy talk.”
“We have to have money for police if we want better police,” Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway said from the state Capitol just hours ahead of a scheduled visit by President-elect Joe Biden.
Conway, who has worked in law enforcement for more than 40 years, accused Democrats of trying “to change the basic concept of police work.”
“All we’ve heard for months from the Democratic Party is ‘defund the police,'” he said. “I understand that Joe Biden is talking the other way now, not wanting to ‘defund the police’ until after this election, but that doesn’t change anything.”
Conway also slammed Democratic senatorial candidate Raphael Warnock, who he erroneously claimed “doesn’t respect the police and has called us thugs.”
“I take that as a personal affront because I don’t know any thug police officers,” he said.
Conway appeared to be referring to a 2015 sermon in which Warnock, the senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, urged his parishioners to read a Justice Department report on policing in Ferguson, Missouri.
He told his parishioners the report “talks about the use of police force and police violence to crush the poor,” adding, “in Ferguson: police power showing up in a kind of gangster and thug mentality.”
His language has been highlighted in attack ads by opponent Sen. Kelly Loeffler.
Warnock has said for months he opposes defunding the police, the concept of eliminating or reallocating funds from police budgets.
Some groups began pushing for stripping police budgets in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in late May.
Republican candidates and President Trump loyalists have latched on to the far left’s support for defunding and, in some cases, abolishing police departments across the country.
Ahead of the November general election, the GOP was able to brand the Democratic Party as a whole as easy on crime and public safety.
Trump, who labeled himself the “law and order president,” received a groundswell of support for his pro-police stance, while Biden admitted last week that Republicans successfully used the movement to defeat Democrats in down-ballot races.
“That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police. We’re not,” Biden said in a leaked audio recording of a meeting with civil rights leaders that was obtained by the Intercept. “We’re talking about holding them accountable.”
Biden cautioned about the use of the phrase and other divisive rhetoric that he worried would hurt the two Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and Warnock, locked in twin runoff races in Georgia.
The outcome of the races will determine which party takes control of the U.S. Senate. Ossoff and Warnock must win for Democrats to take control of the upper chamber, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris casting any tie-breaking votes.
Former President Barack Obama also waded into the controversy, telling Democrats that using a “snappy slogan” could backfire.
“If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it’s not biased and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘defund the police,’ but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,” he told Good Luck America host Peter Hamby earlier this month.
His advice didn’t sit well with some in his party, such as Cori Bush, elected this year as the first black woman to represent Missouri in Congress.
Bush tweeted, “It’s not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive.”
Ossoff and Warnock’s Republican challengers, Sens. David Perdue and Loeffler, have already seized on Biden’s comments and used them to question their opponents’ commitment to public safety.
Perdue told the Washington Examiner ahead of Biden’s visit: “Jon Ossoff is taking Joe Biden’s advice: conceal from Georgia voters Democrats’ plans to defund the police until after the election. It’s a shameful political strategy, given how badly Georgia’s communities would suffer if our police are defunded.
“I proudly stand with our men and women in blue, and I will continue to fight back against the radical liberal agenda that my opponent would rubber stamp.”
