Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden criticized former President George H.W. Bush in 1989 for proposing a budget plan that did not, in his view, adequately deal with “violent thugs.”
“I know it’s hard to believe, but this very day, violent drug offenders will commit more than 100,000 crimes on this day alone,” the then-senator from Delaware said in the September 1989 video recorded via CSPAN. “And the sad part is that the we have — we have no more police on the streets of our major cities that we had ten years ago.”
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“And what the President proposes won’t help much,” Biden continued. “What he proposes is no increase of what the Congress has already approved last year. In a nutshell, the President’s plan doesn’t include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, not enough prosecutors to convict them, not enough judges to sentence them, and not enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.”
The “defund the police” movement has become a political landmine of late for the Biden campaign as many Democrats on the left, including celebrities like John Legend and Megan Rapinoe and politicos like former Hillary Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon, have moved to openly support the concept in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. (RELATED: Civil Rights Attorney Leo Terrell: Democratic Party Has Been ‘Hijacked By The Extremists’)
While Biden’s campaign platform calls for an additional $300 million to fund the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, which focuses on community policing, it does not include include any move to “defund” police departments around the country.