Does Joe Biden Want to ‘Defund the Police’?

No. His campaign website has long called for further funding to increase diversity and add oversight.

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President Trump and his campaign have repeatedly claimed that Joe Biden wants to defund the police on Twitter and in campaign emails:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1269630609883910144
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1269617458354282502
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1268635752214208514

Biden’s rapid response director Andrew Bates said in a statement on Monday that Biden does not want to defund police and instead wants to reform the police. In a clip from an interview with CBS that was released later that day, Biden himself said, “No, I don’t support defunding the police. I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness and, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.”

While the interview came after Trump’s Twitter accusations, Biden’s “Plan for Strengthening America’s Commitment to Justice” on his campaign website has for some time stated that Biden supports further funding of police departments to increase racial diversity in departments and add further oversight. The Wayback Machine first archived the page in July 2019. The relevant section of his website outlines Biden’s plan as follows:

Reinvigorate community-oriented policing. Policing works best when officers are out of their cruisers and walking the streets, engaging with and getting to know members of their communities. But in order to do that, police departments need resources to hire a sufficient number of officers. Biden spearheaded the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, which authorized funding both for the hiring of additional police officers and for training on how to undertake a community policing approach. However, the program has never been funded to fulfill the original vision for community policing. Biden will reinvigorate the COPS program with a $300 million investment. As a condition of the grant, hiring of police officers must mirror the racial diversity of the community they serve. Additionally, as president, Biden will establish a panel to scrutinize what equipment is used by law enforcement in our communities.

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  1. Pingback: 비트코인투자
  • Avatar photo
    Ray Salemi

    It occurs to me that after ex-Republicans saw their party get hijacked by The Tea Party and then by Trump, they could be forgiven for thinking that the Democratic Party is close to being taken over by extremists.

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    1. Luke Thompson

      The Tea Party wasn't hijacking. It was the captain trying to reassert his power. After all, including 2020, we're now at forty years of picking the least conservative option out of the serious primary candidates. The party of Lincoln and Coolidge can't survive that.

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    Pat Riot

    So to be clear, "Defund the Police" means, "Spend more money on public safety overall so police can do their job better and with more accountability".

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      Pat Riot

      (It's a muddled message at best).

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        Ray Salemi

        He’s not espousing that message.

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  • Melissa

    Good thing Trump has caps lock to add emphasis where facts fail to come through : P

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  • Luke Thompson

    In two of the three tweets, Trump makes it clear that he's saying Biden won't have a choice because of his party. Obviously, that's a debatable question, but it can't be fact checked.

    If there was only the middle tweet, this piece would make sense, but taken together, I don't think you can reasonably make the claim that Biden's policy position actually contradicts what Trump said.

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      Mudskipper

      And I am not sure you can reasonably just wave away the second tweet.

      The point is that Trump wants people to associate Biden with the defund the police position. And he has no basis to make that association.

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      1. Luke Thompson

        Trump is a moron. The middle tweet can reasonably be read as just tying Biden into what Trump thinks the whole party is going to do. It's poorly phrased, but part of that is that "want" is so ambiguous. I may not want to move my rook to K5 in the chess game I'm playing with my brother, but with a gun to my head, you could honestly say that I did.
        With all three tweets, I don't think you can argue that Biden's campaign positions override Trump's statements. Two of the three imply that Biden doesn't actually want to do it but is being/will be forced to.

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          Kev_WDE

          Can you imagine what kind of downward spiral is going to happen once Drumpf realizes the polls aren't "fake news?"

          This moron, who seems to think the U.S. military is his personal security detail...stuff is fixin to get a lot worse.

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          1. Luke Thompson

            Oh, I think it will be a mess. I've been rooting for him to resign since January of last year. I'm trying to decide if I'll vote Jay Cost or Mike Pence in November. Leaning toward the former.

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        Kev_WDE

        Can he go a day without making a baseless accusation or telling an outright lie?

        I mean, now he’s saying the 75-year-old man a Buffalo cop pushed down is part of Antifa.

        I want to say it was Mencken who said, “A demagogue is someone who says something he knows is untrue to an audience he knows is ignorant.”

        Could there be a more apt description of Drumpf and his supporters?

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          Mudskipper

          You know, if I were to rank the lies Trump tells, I would rank this as one of his lesser, since it isn't uncommon for politicians to tar their opponents through guilt by association.

          But claiming that that old man was a member of Antifa while the poor guy is in the hospital with a very serious head injury? That is right up there with some of his worst lies. He really has no--and I mean no--empathy or decency.

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            Kev_WDE

            "He really has no--and I mean no--empathy or decency."

            Yes. Two of the calling cards of...what's the word I'm looking for...a sociopath.

            As far as ranking the lies, it's a challenge. One could make the argument that the first BIG LIE could be the clubhouse leader.

            Poor Reince Priebus. Day 1 on the job and Trump is screaming that objective facts are "f*cking bullshit!" Looking back, was not -- or should it not have been -- this a huge red flag for us all?

            https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02/reince-priebus-opens-up-about-his-six-months-of-magical-thinking

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      Ray Salemi

      The leftists in the party would have to win some contested elections. They’ve failed and so have little power.

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      1. Luke Thompson

        The party mainstream now is well to the left of where it was in 2008. It's a lot easier to look moderate when the party moved to the left.

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          Ray Salemi

          The left was disgusted by Obama’s centrist policies.

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          1. Luke Thompson

            Obama had the either the furthest or second furthest left voting record in the Senate (depending on how you count). The claim that he was a moderate is revisionist nonsense. He didn't have centrist policies or ideas except as compromises.

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          Ray Salemi

          It was dead center in 2008.

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          1. Luke Thompson

            No, it wasn't.

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      rlritt

      Except it is just a vey small group of anarchists---not Democrats--- who call for defunding the police. Most of the police I knew were Democrats.

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      1. Luke Thompson

        It's a good portion of the online left. And it's hard to determine what portion of the actual left that is until we have polling data, which I've not seen yet.

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        Rob W

        If the social media activities of my daughters’ friends is any indication, it’s not just a very small group of anarchists. It’s being taken up by the youth progressive movement as a whole. We’re talking young to mid-20s, graduates of major universities, with great jobs in tech, finance, research, medicine and law.

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          Ray Salemi

          “ If the social media activities of my daughters’ friends is any indication”

          They are not any indication.

          They don’t vote.

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            Rob W

            For good or ill, Ray, these ones do. They are very politically active, ran registration drives in college, volunteered during the primaries for their candidate (mostly Sanders, Warren or Pete), etc.

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    Ray Salemi

    I’ll need to save this link for later use. I suspect we’ll here a lot of this.

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      rlritt

      I agree. The right always wants to consider Democrats and Anarchists as the same. But they scream foul when they hear people say Republicans support NAZI's.
      I strongly disagree with that opinion, yet we have seen groups of people marching with Swasticas and Confederate flags in support of Trump.

      I think reasonable people need to calm down and drop the hyperbole.

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        Ray Salemi

        I am flat out astounded at the pearl-clutching I hear about the 2012 campaign. It’s like nobody remembers that Lee Atwater was a Republican.

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          Kev_WDE

          Yeah. Atwater made up that lie about Dukakis’s furloughing convicts. 😊

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            Ray Salemi

            Yup. That might have been the start of it all.

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        2sequoia

        Exactly!

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    2. John M

      At this point, I'll settle for the pretense of sincerity, pragmatism, and moderation, since I know what it looks like when that pretense is dropped by influential leaders. I still don't trust him. The devil will be in the details, and whether he can withstand attacks on his platform from the left or calls to fund groups that are either promoting violence or complicit in it. This is his moment to prove he's in charge.

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        rlritt

        Biden has always supported law enforcement. Why does he have to fear the "extreme left boogeyman"? First, they don't vote. Second, if he's elected why would he cave to the so called left wing? Its not like he has long career ahead of him to worry about

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          Kev_WDE

          I don't get Biden's self-flagellation over the '94 "crime bill."

          With a couple of exceptions (looking at you, "assault" weapons ban,) it was a good bill. Crime rates came down significantly. And the gun control provisions made Newt Speaker of the House.

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        2. John M

          Please don't minimize my fears. You don't sit where I sit. They don't have to hold office to be incredibly destructive.

          I see a system nobody fully understands with multiple points of possible failure. It's vulnerable to technological advance that go right around or through guardrails.

          Any panic about Biden is mostly just transferrence in my opinion, but that doesn't mean it's unwarranted in the abstract or that there aren't really worrisome long term trends advancing in an illiberal direction. Trump's tweets that are often indistinguishable from a spam advertisement for Viagra don't really clarify anything.

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            Ray Salemi

            I think it’s unwarranted in reality though.

            The left has lost a LOT of power since South Carolina.

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        Ray Salemi

        The key is to listen to what he actually says and done rather than what Republicans say he said and did.

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        1. John M

          I can't wait until we can have real conversations again. So much noise it's impossible to demodulate the signal.

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  • Harvey Cody

    What are you people doing? "Does Joe Biden Want to 'Defund the Police'?" might be a question worth asking. However, it is irrelevant to what Trump said. Trump did not comment on whether Biden wants to 'defund the police." As your article reports, Trump said, "Not only will Sleepy Joe Biden DEFUND THE POLICE, but he will DEFUND OUR MILITARY! He has no choice, the Dems are controlled by the Radical Left."

    The relevant question is, "Will Joe Biden have no choice but to support defunding the police because of the influence of the radical left on his party?"

    Of course, you cannot prove that Trump is wrong or right in his belief about what Biden will be forced to do. That might be a reason not to comment on Trump's speculations, but it is not a reason to imply that he said something he didn't in order to declare that the thing you errantly implied he said was false.

    Asking and answering irrelevant questions is deceptive, misleading, and irresponsible. Please quit doing that.

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      Mudskipper

      You could make your case with the first tweet, but not the second in which Trump explicitly says present Biden, not future Biden, wants to defund the police.

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      1. Harvey Cody

        Fair point. I should have kept reading before commenting.

        I offer the following, not as an excuse (because I don't have an excuse for not having read the whole thing before I commented), but as an explanation of what happened.

        I'm no fan of Trump. Neither am I a fan of deceptive reporting. The Dispatch has engaged in the latter too often. In this instance, Dent said, "President Trump and his campaign have repeatedly claimed that Joe Biden wants to defund the police on Twitter and in campaign emails:" and then the first item in support of that claim did not support the claim. I assumed Dent would lead with his best shot, and it was irrelevant. (Now having read the whole thing, I now see that two out of his three quotes were irrelevant.)

        The

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      Ray Salemi

      And Trump specifically said Biden would defund the military.

      I don’t know how you got any other message from Trump’s words.

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      Ray Salemi

      The radical left has lost most of its elections. There is no real influence. Just a lot of noise.

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      1. John M

        Ray, out of kindness (and some humility) I avoid shaking you from your slumber, because I thankfully don't suffer from envy... just fifty other character flaws. If it were 2015, the Republican Party vanguard would all be laughing at the prospect of President Trump. Stay vigilant.

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          Ray Salemi

          Bernie lost the primary. So a big difference there.

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            Ray Salemi

            Bernie lost twice.

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        2. John M

          Let's add laziness and a powerful need for me to get a life in there as well.

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    4. John M

      I truly cannot parse what you just wrote.

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      1. John M

        I'm not trying to be confrontational. I just couldn't get through the last two paragraphs with an understanding of what you're saying.

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        1. Harvey Cody

          I didn't take your comment as being confrontational. I'm just not sure what you are not understanding. As Mudskipper pointed out, what I said errantly ignored that one of Dent's three examples did quote Trump saying that Biden "wants" (present tense) to defund.

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          1. John M

            Also, understood. All of our institutions have parasites (public schools, police, etc), and it's really hard to extract them without killing the host. I view the military as not having this problem so much, and most Americans seem to agree with me.

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          2. John M

            I can't even count, but there was something like a quadruple-negative in your second to last paragraph. I normally like the challenge, but I just gave up. 😁

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