Sen. Cory Booker said he won’t call for law enforcement to be defunded amid growing demands among liberals to do so.
“Well, I understand clearly the sentiment and the substance behind the slogan. And so while it’s not a slogan I’ll use, if people just dismiss it and don’t get deeper into the substance, as I said earlier,” the New Jersey Democrat told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “it is not a mark of a beloved community to prey upon the most vulnerable in your society.”
“We are using police, and, as the guy who ran police departments, I would have exhausted police officers saying, ‘Why are we using police to deal with the fragility or vulnerability of our society?’ There’s so much money going into our police departments, that is a more expensive way to deal with it,” he added.
Liberals furious over police brutality and racial injustice have offered the solution of defunding law enforcement to fix the issues.
There are various interpretations about what defunding the police would look like. Some supporters want to reallocate police funding to social services in marginalized communities. Others want to strip all police funding and disband the departments.
