Joe Biden falsely claimed that there were no “racial riots” in the last four years of the Obama administration while he criticized President Trump’s response to nationwide civil unrest, including the riots that broke out this week in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
“By the way, if you notice, the last four — the four years before, we — we created more jobs in the last three years than he’s created so far, No. 1,” Biden said on MSNBC Thursday, responding to Trump’s argument that Biden did not solve issues in the nearly five decades since he first took public office. “Like that old phrase goes, everything he’s inherited, he screwed up. He screwed up the economy so badly.”
He then turned to talking about riots under President Barack Obama.
“For the last four years, we weren’t having riots, racial riots. And when they occurred, we didn’t have to go call in the National [Guard] — we protected federal property without hurting people. We moved in a direction that made sense,” Biden said, appearing to refer to the National Guard.
“He’s a fiction writer in the extreme,” Biden added about Trump.
Biden’s statement about racial riots under Obama is not accurate.
Riots broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old, in 2014, the sixth year of Obama’s presidency and his third to last year in office. There were waves of riots and unrest in August just after the shooting, in November after officer Darren Wilson was not indicted, and a third wave in August 2015 on the anniversary of the shooting.
The incident and subsequent riots helped make “Black Lives Matter” a nationally recognized phrase, along with “Hands up, don’t shoot,” a debunked reference to early reports that Brown was surrendering when he was shot. A Department of Justice investigation found that the shots that Wilson fired “were in self-defense and thus were not objectively unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”
Obama said in November 2014 that those who destroyed property should be prosecuted. The governor deployed the National Guard to help quell the unrest, and Obama appeared wary about the move, saying that he thought the guard should be “used in a limited and appropriate way.”
Riots also broke out in Baltimore, Maryland, in April 2015, the seventh and second to last year of Obama’s presidency, over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man whose neck and spine were injured while he was in a police vehicle, which sent him into a coma and resulted in his death. The Black Lives Matter movement also participated in protests over Gray’s death.
Obama condemned the rioting and looting in a speech from the White House.
“There’s no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday. It is counterproductive,” Obama said. “When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they’re not protesting. They’re not making a statement. They’re stealing. When they burn down a building, they’re committing arson. And they’re destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities. That robs jobs and opportunity from people in that area.”
Maryland’s Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, deployed the state National Guard to Baltimore in response to the riots.
Biden, on Wednesday, condemned the rioting in Kenosha that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man from Wisconsin.
“As I said, after George Floyd’s murder, protesting brutality is a right and absolutely necessary. But burning down communities is not protest. It’s needless violence,” Biden said. “Violence that endangers lives, violence that guts businesses, and shutters businesses, that shutters communities. That’s wrong.”
