Biden in a bind over calls to defund the police

Biden was silent over the weekend as lawmakers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the site of Floyd’s death, debated the idea and protesters painted the new rallying cry on the road leading to the White House.

Instead, the two-term vice president pushed Congress to act fast on police-reform measures, such as a federal chokehold ban, national use-of-force guidelines, and a crackdown on police militarization. Those initiatives lost him support among police groups, including the National Association of Police Organizations. At the same time, his team pointed to his pitch to invest $300 million in the Community Oriented Policing Services program.

It wasn’t until President Trump and his camp latched onto the issue for their political gain that Biden spokesman Andrew Bates released a statement on Monday afternoon.

“As his criminal justice proposal made clear months ago, Vice President Joe Biden does not believe that police should be defunded,” Bates wrote.

Biden also wants to pour money into public schools, summer programs, and mental health and substance abuse treatment schemes, separate from police funding, Bates said. He’d like to boost investments in recruitment diversity, training, and body-worn camera enforcement as well.

The death of Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, last month after a Minneapolis officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes has transformed public opinion on police brutality and racial injustice. A Monmouth University poll found 33% of the public, 26% of whom identified as white, thought police were likely to use excessive force against African Americans after Eric Garner was killed in New York City in 2014. The same poll last week revealed 57% of people, 49% of whom were white, held the same view after Floyd’s death.

But Biden’s delayed response bears testament to his predicament: appeasing liberals so they vote for him in November while staying true to his centrist policy approach that connects with fellow moderates and independents ahead of the general election.

Although there’s a growing consensus on the subject, tensions over whether to defund police are playing out in Minneapolis in real-time.

After the city’s unrest over Floyd triggered nationwide protests, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was told to “get the f— out” of a demonstration on Saturday when he refused to back “the full abolition” of his police department in favor of structural reform that addressed systemic racism in its culture.

On Sunday, a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council supported dismantling the police department, with the council’s president, Lisa Bender, saying, “Our efforts at incremental reform have failed, period.” Liberal firebrands New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar applauded the council’s decision.

“Moral courage and clarity from Minneapolis CM president,” Omar tweeted.

Although not as extreme, a similar anti-police trend has emerged in the country’s two largest cities.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday announced budget cuts to his $6 billion police department, promising to divert an undisclosed amount of funds to youth and other social services. Last week, Los Angeles City Mayor Eric Garcetti, a Biden campaign co-chair, said up to $150 million might be pulled from the city’s $2 billion police department budget as part of a $250 million injection into healthcare, jobs, and “healing” programs aimed at helping the black community.

In anticipation of criticism from the Left, when pressed by the Washington Examiner, Biden’s team declined to commit to adopting some of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s ideas, as Biden’s done on other topics. For instance, Sanders, the progressive standard-bearer, has called for federal funds to be stripped from police departments that violate civil rights.

Democratic National Committee member Bob Mulholland, who like Garcetti is based in reliably blue California, praised Biden’s belated statement as “very appropriate.”

“Our national platform will call for appropriate police reform or smarter police tactics, not for defunding law enforcement,” he said ahead of the party’s convention in August. “If someone at 3 a.m. is breaking into your home, who you going to call? 911 for police. I won’t be calling the Ghostbusters.”

Regardless of the political reality, the rhetoric is still causing problems for Democrats.

In Biden’s absence of leadership, prominent Democrats, such as New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Florida Rep. Val Demings, were forced to answer questions about the issue, each offering a different opinion.

“I do believe there is opportunity here for the police and the community to come together, and kind of spread, look at the responsibilities, things that police are taking on that they were never supposed to take on in the first place,” Demings, a former police chief, told CBS Monday.

California Sen. Kamala Harris, another Biden vice presidential hopeful and a former prosecutor, added during a Capitol Hill press conference Monday that, “We have confused having safe communities with hiring more cops on the street.”

Wary of a messaging trap, Chris Lippincott, a Democratic strategist in Texas, a traditionally Republican state in which Democrats are hoping to be competitive in this cycle, warned his party to be careful about how it marketed any proposals.

“Republicans at every level of government have defunded public schools, and they have had the good sense to mask it in words like ‘reform’ and ‘accountability,'” he said. “Words matter in politics, so I think understanding not just the substance but the presentation of a police reform agenda will be important for candidates running at every level from city council to the presidency.”