Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voiced support for growing demands from criminal justice reform activists that local governments scale down funds typically given to police departments and direct that money to social programs instead.
“The problem is not a lack of resources here,” Ocasio-Cortez said Wednesday on Good Morning America. “In fact, many folks here in our community say that the problem is the opposite, is that not enough resources are being put into the very kinds of social programming and investments that prevent crime and social discord in the first place.”
The May 25 death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, has sparked insistence from Black Lives Matter activists that elected officials address systemic racism in government, specifically within police departments.
In Washington, D.C., one of the epicenters of nationwide demonstrations protesting the police brutality that led to Floyd’s death, the phrase “defund the police” was written on 16th Street in front of the White House. The mayor has renamed the area, just north of Lafayette Square, “Black Lives Matter Plaza.”
Ocasio-Cortez said the phrase “defund the police” had less to do with funding for law enforcement than it does with how governments spend taxpayer dollars.
“And so what a lot of folks are talking about, when it comes into this movement, is that they’re asking for the same budget priorities that many affluent suburbs already have,” she said. “And it may sound strange, but many affluent suburbs have essentially already begun pursuing a defunding of the police in that they fund schools, they fund housing, and they fund healthcare more as their No. 1 priorities.”
President Trump has so far dismissed the idea of reforming police budgets in America, vowing to keep federal funding for law enforcement where it is. Presumptive Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden has also said he is against the idea of pulling funding from police but suggested more needed to be done to invest in African American communities.
“No, I don’t support defunding the police,” Biden said this week. “I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness. And, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.”
But Biden’s critics, including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, have attempted to tie Biden to more aggressive views on police reform espoused by liberals such as Ocasio-Cortez in the wake of Floyd’s death.
“The president is appalled by the ‘defund the police’ movement,” McEnany said this week. “The fact that you have sitting congresswomen wanting to defund the police, notably Rashida Tlaib, notably Biden adviser AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former Clinton and Eric Holder spokesperson Brian Fallon, wanting to defund our police across the country? It is extraordinary.”
The freshman congresswoman from the Bronx said one of the major problems with police funding was the type of military-grade equipment given to local police departments.
“Well, I think there’s — one question that is interesting here is that when it comes to funds, it’s not always just about the number of officers in the street,” she said. “It’s about these police precincts that have tanks, that have military weaponry, and frankly have a degree of … of material resources and warlike weaponry … that people ask, ‘Why does a local police precinct have this in the first place?'”
