The Rev. Al Sharpton argued that people who support doing away with police are wealthy liberals who do not deal with everyday crime.
“To take all policing off is something that I think a latte liberal may go for as they sit around the Hamptons discussing this as some academic problem,” he said during a Tuesday segment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “But people living on the ground need proper policing. Yes, we need more resources in different areas like mental health, but we do not need our grandmothers prey to those that are being the users of products of the big gun manufacturers in this country.”
The push to defund the police gained nationwide momentum after George Floyd, a black man, died in Minneapolis police custody on Memorial Day. All four officers involved in Floyd’s arrest were fired and face charges. Protests across the country that highlight racial inequality and police brutality sprung up in the aftermath of Floyd’s death.
Many protesters view the Black Lives Matter movement as a way to reassess the role of law enforcement in the United States, but others have suggested a less radical approach by reallocating resources away from police departments to more social services.
“We need to reimagine how we do policing,” Sharpton said.
The fight over defunding the police has also wedged its way into the presidential election. President Trump has repeatedly accused Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden of trying to abolish the police. Biden has said he’s open to looking into police funding but not abolition.
On June 8, Biden’s campaign said that he did not believe in defunding the police. A month later, Biden said he believed some police funding should be redirected, but on Aug. 5, he said he actually wanted to “get police more money.”
