“We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to fund the police,” President Joe Biden postured in his State of the Union speech. But that gesture to the polling doesn’t change the fact that he’s been walking a very different walk.
Biden’s administration has repeatedly targeted police departments and promulgated the woke, anti-cop narrative. His Justice Department, notably, revived the Obama-era practice of probing police departments for their racially disparate stop and arrest data — never mind that such simply reflects the unfortunate truth that minorities commit a disproportionate number of crimes.
And Attorney General Merrick Garland announced in September that Justice would be monitoring police departments even more, going beyond federal “pattern or practice” investigations and the resulting consent decrees that hamstring cops. That reverses then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ 2018 memo greatly narrowing the use of consent decrees.
And Biden spent months spewing anti-police bull during the 2020 campaign, slamming the supposed “systemic injustice” of the country’s law enforcement and talking of how “every day, African Americans go about their lives with a constant anxiety and trauma,” wondering who’ll be the next victim of “bad police.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced in September that the Department of Justice will increase the monitoring of police departments.
He was playing to a national trend that’s driven up police retirements and resignations. Ambush attacks against cops were also up 91% last year, with 73 officers killed in the line of duty — the most since 1995. Police departments struggle to find recruits, and some have even stopped responding to low-level crimes due to lack of staff.
Biden needs to offer more than empty platitudes, and direct his entire administration to actually help cops do their jobs.
*story by The New York Post
