President Joe Biden is expected to lay out plans to ask Congress for $37 billion for crime prevention programs.
Biden will outline his Safer America Plan, which allocates $13 billion to hire and train an additional 100,000 police officers over the next five years, $3 billion to help communities clear their court backlogs, and a 13% funding increase for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
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The plan, which was set to be introduced in a visit to Pennsylvania on Thursday before Biden tested positive for COVID-19, also puts $15 billion toward a grant program called the Accelerating Justice System Reform that cities and states can use over the next 10 years to address the causes of crime and ease the burden on police officers by “identifying non-violent situations that may merit a public health response or other response,” the White House said.
Some of the grant funds are targeted toward expanding mental health and substance use disorder services, access to job training, housing, and other services.
An additional $5 billion is allocated to “evidence-based community violence intervention programs” to help formerly incarcerated individuals reenter society by lifting many of the restrictions on eligibility for federal benefits.
The plan also aims to take “commonsense steps on guns” through increased funding for the ATF to hire new agents and investigators to help trace firearms and analyze ballistics at crime scenes.
The plan is part of Biden’s fiscal year 2023 budget requests to Congress, which will begin on Oct. 1.
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Biden’s plan to invest in the police force comes at odds with other members of his party, who have called for defunding the police and reinvesting the money in other public resources.
There were several deadly mass shootings this year. Earlier this month, seven people were killed and dozens were injured during a Fourth of July parade after a 21-year-old gunman opened fire into the crowd from a rooftop in Highland Park, Illinois.
