Nominees offer opposing visions of policing
Policing policy has swept into the heart of the 2020 presidential election as controversial police killings of Black Americans have also triggered sometimes violent clashes between officers and protesters in multiple U.S. cities.
President Donald Trump has taken a hard-line position on policing while Democratic nominee Joe Biden has backtracked from his tough-on-crime positions in the U.S. Senate.
It’s not clear whether or how much most Americans’ day-to-day relationships with police would change under a Trump or a Biden administration. Police departments are locally run and primarily regulated by local and state laws, with collective bargaining agreements and police unions often serving as brakes against change, though the federal government does have some power — by providing funding or by forcing oversight via consent decrees — to encourage change in individual departments.
The two candidates do offer distinct and different federal policy proposals on local policing, and above all, they vastly differ on how they talk about policing’s role in American life.
Trump
The president has sometimes talked about policing as a strongman might, emphasizing domination and force over civil liberties and due process. At a 2017 event in Long Island, he suggested officers not worry so much about injuring suspects. In a speech mentioning immigration agents and gangs, he spoke of suspects in “a paddy wagon … thrown in, rough.” He added, “I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.
“Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put the hand over? … You can take the hand away, OK?”
As protests and violence flared in Minneapolis this summer following the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man, Trump threatened to send in the military, tweeting, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
In one call with the nation’s governors, Trump laid out his philosophy on police violence as a necessary ingredient of enforcing control, reportedly telling them, “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. … The harder you are, the tougher you are, the less likely it is that you’re going to be hit.” In the same call he praised the forceful police crackdown that ended the largely peaceful Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011: “It was a disaster until one day, somebody said, ‘That’s enough,’ and they just went in and wiped them out, and that’s the last time we ever heard the name Occupy Wall Street.”
Several unions representing police officers have rewarded Trump with their endorsements, including the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Union of Police Associations, which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO. “Every top Democrat currently running for this office has vilified the police and made criminals out to be victims,” Sam A. Cabral, the union’s president, said in a statement. “While his candor ruffles the feathers of the left, I find it honest and refreshing.”
The IUPA also cited Trump’s support for providing local police departments with surplus military equipment, tougher prosecutions on suspects accused of attacking police and the Trump administration’s support for resuming federal executions.
Early on, the Trump administration, under then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, curtailed the pursuit of consent decrees from federal judges that forced oversight of troubled local police departments. The Obama administration often used the decrees to force reforms in cities whose police had demonstrated a pattern and practice of using racial discrimination or other illegal policing methods. The Trump administration found the tool too intrusive.
But for Trump’s positions on policing, his administration was also supportive of the First Step Act passed into law in 2018, giving a chance for nonviolent offenders to be released from prison earlier and for future sentences to be lighter.
Biden
In 1994, as many of the nation’s cities were being ravaged by homicides, Biden was a key force in enacting the most sweeping anticrime law in the nation’s history. That gave the Democratic Party credibility to call itself “tough on crime” after Republicans such as President Richard Nixon had cast the GOP as leaders on law and order in a nation chronically rippling with racial tensions. The law included mandatory-minimum sentences for “three strike” soffenders, a measure that helped balloon the nation’s prison population with Black and brown inmates.
That was then. Today, violent crime rates have dramatically fallen, and activists including those in the Black Lives Matter movement have spent the last decade dragging the Democratic Party back to the left on criminal justice, leaving career Democrats like Biden — and his running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor — on the defensive to explain their records. Those tensions have only grown this year as some activists have gone far past recommending reforms, seeing policing as unreformable. Far-left demands now often call for officials to break police unions and to, by various degrees, dismantle, downsize or abolish police departments.
Biden has refused to embrace those calls to “defund the police” and has condemned the arsons and burglaries that have accompanied some protests over police killings, while still urging problem officers to be prosecuted.
In his 2020 platform, Biden supports boosting funding for “communityoriented policing” and hiring police forces that reflect the racial makeup of the communities they serve. He also proposes pairing police with social workers and experts on mental health, substance abuse and disability to respond to calls for service.
Biden’s platform would reverse the Trump administration’s position on consent decrees and expand the Justice Department’s oversight powers of troubled local departments to include “systemic misconduct by prosecutors’ offices.”
“Black mothers and fathers should feel confident that their children are safe walking the streets of America,” Biden’s website says of its criminal justice platform, which also gives a nod to police safety. “And, when a police officer pins on that shield and walks out the door, the officer’s family should know they’ll come home at the end of the day.”
Biden has called to reduce prison populations, including by eliminating mandatory minimums, decriminalizing marijuana use and diverting drug users away from prisons and toward treatment programs.