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- February 3, 2023
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Last March, down near the end of his first State of the Union address, President Joe Biden reached a somber passage where he described the recent fatal shooting of two New York City police officers. He asked for bipartisan support in pursuing both “safety and equal justice.” And then the president leaned into one particular message. “We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police,” Biden said. “It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training—resources and training they need to protect our communities.”
Nearly a year later police departments have plenty of money—and yet Biden’s second State of the Union arrives in the shadow of a fresh tragedy, the brutal beating of Tyre Nichols by Memphis cops. Nichols, a 29-year-old Black FedEx worker, died three days after being pulled from his car during what should have been a routine traffic stop. The ugly assault was captured on body-cam video; five of the Memphis officers involved were fired.
The particulars of Nichols’s death are significant, but so is the fact that it is only the latest in a long string of episodes where cops have abused Black Americans. On Tuesday night, in front of a national TV audience, Biden should seize the raw, painful moment to make an even more forceful case for the middle ground between defunding the police and blindly backing the blue.
In many ways Biden is the ideal president to advance the argument and have it heard across the political spectrum. His emphatic call last year to fund the police was partly a political calculation: Heading into the midterms, Biden was trying to inoculate Democratic candidates against perennial Republican fearmongering that the party is soft on crime. But his statement was also consistent with who Biden has been for a very long time: a mainstream ally of law enforcement, going all the way back to 1994, when he was a Delaware senator and a principal sponsor of the federal crime bill that helped drive down violent crime but also escalated drug-offense penalties and incarceration. In 2020, more than 190 law enforcement officials endorsed Biden against Donald Trump.
All of which gives Biden, as president, the credibility and profile to push, loud and clear, for an overhaul in how the country keeps its citizens safe, without being demonized as a coddler of criminals. Taking sizable amounts of money away from police departments isn’t going to happen, and in most cases probably shouldn’t. But Biden can advocate to change how that money is spent, with more dollars targeted to programs like violence interruption, and to redefine the scope of police work so that cops, for instance, aren’t the first ones responding to mentally ill people in distress. The president should also emphatically call on police unions, which are frequently key impediments to change, to be part of the solution.
Biden’s Department of Justice has already taken some welcome, if reactive, steps toward reducing police misconduct, reviving “pattern or practice” investigations of troubled municipal forces, a tactic that was halted by the Trump administration. “It is absolutely night and day,” says Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison, whose office successfully prosecuted former police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. “It’s the difference between caring and not giving a damn. As soon as Biden came in they started investigations in Minneapolis and a whole bunch of other places.”
Biden, during his first year in office, supported the 2021 reintroduction of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, but it stalled in the Senate, partly due to Republican opposition to a nationwide database to track police misconduct. In the wake of Nichols’s death, there have been fitful talks about reviving the Floyd Act, including by Vice President Kamala Harris, who vowed to push for its passage at Nichols’s funeral. Republican obstructionism that extends from domestic to foreign policy makes that highly unlikely—a reality Biden will be reminded of when he delivers his second State of the Union standing in front of a new Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, whose majority is currently intent on pushing the nation toward default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless Biden agrees to budget cuts.
That standoff will likely be one of the other subjects the president discusses Tuesday. Biden will probably plead for a bipartisan resolution even as he tries to make clear which party is creating this looming economic crisis. He’ll have plenty more on his agenda: the need to continue to send weapons and money to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s invasion and his administration’s decision to declare an end to the COVID public health emergency—after extending it one more time, into May. He’ll likely tout the latter as progress, though the move is driven more by politics than by science: Congress hasn’t appropriated any more money, even though the World Health Organization says the pandemic continues, and pushing the emergency’s bureaucratic end a few months helps prop up border restrictions.
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