(Casey Harper, The Center Square) Vice President Kamala Harris’ kickstart to her presidential campaign last week immediately faced a flurry of references to her most controversial stances and statements, not the least of which was her support of the “defund the police” movement in 2020.
“Defund the police” took off as a movement in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter riots in cities around the country.
In June 2020, Harris praised the movement, repeatedly saying we need to “reimagine” how we get safety in our cities and rework budgets instead of spending so much on police.
“Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety,” Harris told the radio show “Ebro in the Morning” in a clip now resurfaced by CNN. “When you have cities with one third of their entire city budget focused on policing, we know that is not the smart way or the best way or the right way to achieve safety.”
“This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out if it reflects the right priorities,” she continued. “For too long the status quo thinking has been, you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that’s wrong.”
When Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti diverted $150 million from the police budget, Harris praised the decision.
“I applaud Eric Garcetti for what he’s done,” Harris said on “Good Morning America” at the time.
Many American cities saw a spike in violent crime in the months following the BLM riots.
In 2022, Garcetti pushed for adding about $150 million to the city’s police budget, an apparent about-face turn on the policy.
Again in June of 2020, Harris echoed her support for the “defund the police” movement during an appearance on ABC’s “The View.”
Harris proposed diverting funding from police to social services.
“We have confused the idea that to achieve safety you put more cops on the street instead of understanding to achieve safe and healthy communities you put more resources into the public education system of those communities, into affordable housing, into home ownership, into access for capital for small businesses, access for healthcare regardless of how much money people have,” Harris said. “That’s how you achieve safe and healthy communities.”
President Joe Biden came out and distanced himself from the “defund the police” movement during its peak. Later in 2020, when the issue was less popular and Harris was grappling with being Biden’s pick for vice president, Harris’ press team reportedly claimed Harris did not support defunding police.
Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have hit Harris for her stance on the issue. Trump pushed out a clip of Harris’ comments praising defunding police to his followers over the weekend.
“She’s a radical left lunatic, defund the police, all of the different things,” Trump said of Harris during remarks in Nashville over the weekend.
Defunding police never had majority support, and after 2020, what support it did have dropped significantly, according to polling from Pew Research.
“Support for reducing spending on police has fallen significantly: 15% of adults now say spending should be decreased, down from 25% in 2020,” Pew said in an October of 2021 release. “And only 6% now advocate decreasing spending a lot, down from 12% who said this last year. At the same time, 37% of adults now say spending on police should stay about the same, down from 42% in 2020.”
