Former Vice President Joe Biden rejected the Trump campaign’s attempts to tie him to activists’ calls to defund the police, saying he supports a broad package of reforms rather than defunding. Biden “hears and shares the deep grief and frustration of those calling out for change, and is driven to ensure that justice is done and that we put a stop to this terrible pain,” and supports “the urgent need for reform,” his campaign said in a statement, but “As his criminal justice proposal made clear months ago, Vice President Biden does not believe that police should be defunded.”
Biden has called for $300 million for community policing along with funding for body cameras. He has also called for investments in some of the community, social, and health programs that advocates of defunding want to shift money into as it’s taken out of police budgets.
But while advocates for defunding have called for community-based and community-led programs to replace some functions of police, “community policing” as it has been practiced in recent years has not been an improvement, some advocates say. It’s “an empty phrase,” Derecka Purnell and Marbre Stahly-Butts wrote in The New York Times last year. “A Washington Post report showed that law enforcement use of force increased in half of police departments with consent decrees. Asking police officers to strengthen community relationships—including by doing things like playing football with children or handing out ice cream—does not reduce their power to harm anyone.”
Biden’s community policing plan would involve hiring more police—not exactly in line with the call of defunding advocates.
Where defunders might advocate to replace police with social workers in interactions with homeless people and people with mental illness, Biden’s criminal justice reform plan calls to have police trained by social workers, disability advocates, and substance abuse experts on de-escalation tactics, and to have such experts “respond to calls with police officers so individuals who should not be in the criminal justice system are diverted to treatment for addiction or mental health problems, or are provided with the housing or other social services they may need.”
Joe Biden is not going to embrace “defund the police” as a slogan. The interesting question is how far that movement can push him in revamping his criminal justice policy plans toward its goals.