President Biden’s plan to crack down on soaring crime rates by spending $13 billion to hire 100,000 police officers is drawing sharp criticism from some of his biggest allies, who say he is repeating the mistakes of his 1994 crime bill.
Mr. Biden is scheduled to outline his plan Tuesday during a trip to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The plan to fight crime was supposed to be announced last month, but the event was delayed after Mr. Biden twice tested positive for COVID-19 and then went on a two-week vacation.
The president will outline his proposal amid a nationwide crime surge and after a particularly bloody weekend. A rookie running back for the Washington Commanders was shot in broad daylight in the District of Columbia, one person was killed and another injured in a shooting near a Chicago police station, and a gunman opened fire inside an Oregon supermarket and killed two people.
Under Mr. Biden’s plan, $37 billion would go to “support law enforcement and crime prevention.” That includes $3 billion to clear court backlogs, $15 billion to create a grant program for cities and states to prevent violent crime, and $15 billion for community violence intervention programs.
The centerpiece of his proposal, a $13 billion plan to hire 100,000 police officers across the country over five years, has drawn widespread condemnation from civil rights groups and racial justice activists.
They say Mr. Biden is reprising the missteps of a 1994 crime bill that he led as a senator from Delaware. That bill also included a provision for 100,000 more officers.
“This is just a remix of the 1994 crime bill,” said Hawk Newsome, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York. “Joe Biden is the architect of mass incarceration for thousands of Black people, and he’s about to re-create it.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund have issued statements slamming Mr. Biden’s proposal to add more cops to the nation’s streets.
In its statement, the NCAAP Legal Defense and Educational Fund said an expansion of police forces is “counterproductive to public safety” and “discriminatory.”
A White House official told The Washington Times that Mr. Biden supports “the basic notion that when it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer isn’t to defund the police, it’s to fund the police.”
“He will highlight how his plan would invest in 100,000 more cops who will be trained and supervised consistent with standards in the President’s executive order to advance effective, accountable community policing that builds public trust and strengthens public safety,” the official said.
Kevin McGary, president of the conservative activist group Every Black Life Matters, said civil rights activists’ concerns are overblown. He said more officers are needed to replace those who have walked off the job amid a wave of anti-police sentiment in the past couple of years.
“Equating this with the 1994 crime bill is misguided,” he said. “When you consider there are so many cities that have defunded the police and so many officers resigning, there are more than 100,000 officers that have left the ranks of law enforcement. We do need to reinvest in police.”
Although no national numbers are available, nearly 2,500 New York City police officers have filed paperwork to leave the department. The Philadelphia Police Department is down 1,300 officers.
The 1994 bill, signed into law by President Clinton, was the culmination of Mr. Biden’s decades-long effort to make the Democrats the party of law enforcement. It was a time when America was awash in violent crime and his party was regularly blamed.
Criminal justice reform activists said the bill was one of the key contributors to mass incarcerations in the 1990s. They said it led to more severe prison sentences, more inmates and more aggressive policing that has hit Black communities disproportionately.
Mr. Biden has defended the law as recently as 2016. He told an audience that it “restored American cities” after high rates of crime and violence.
As a presidential candidate, Mr. Biden has tried to distance himself from his signature legislation.
In 2019, Mr. Biden called the bill “a big mistake” because it toughened the sentences for crack cocaine possession, increasing incarceration in the Black community.
“It was a big mistake that was made,” he said at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event. “We were told by the experts that ‘With crack, you can never go back.’ It’s trapped an entire generation.”
Mr. Biden was seen as a key ally of police during four decades in Washington, but he changed his tune when the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis touched off a nationwide reckoning on race and policing.
As a presidential candidate in 2020, Mr. Biden called for dramatic overhauls of policing. He proposed more investigations into local departments, called for a national police oversight commission and tepidly denounced rioters who were looting U.S. cities in protest of Floyd’s death.
Since taking office, Mr. Biden has consistently resisted the “defund the police” movement. He has called on cities to increase spending on police forces. He has scrapped his campaign pledge to create an oversight commission and has failed to sign a major bill that would overhaul policing in America.
Mr. Biden signed an executive order in May to create a national registry of police officers fired for misconduct. The move was widely criticized for being ineffectual.
Last year, Mr. Biden was heavily criticized by racial justice activists after he announced a $300 million initiative to increase police hiring. Black civil rights groups warned the president that he could lose their support if he championed similar positions.
Mr. Biden also has appointed several advocates of defunding the police to high-level positions in his administration. They include Kristen Clarke, who leads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, and Melanca Clark, who served as a member of his transition team.
“Joe Biden is a snake oil salesman,” Mr. Newsome said. “He promised massive police reforms and failed to deliver. He promised us safer communities and failed to deliver. And promised us economic opportunities and failed to deliver. He just talks and never delivers for Black people. Failing to pass the police reform bill is a slap in the face.”
As Mr. McGary sees it, Mr. Biden is seeking to appease liberals calling for massive changes to policing while trying to blunt Republican criticism that Democrats are too soft on crime.
“This is a guy who is really trying to play both sides against the middle,” he said. “He has no principles, and that’s why his policies are inconsistent and all over the place.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of new police officers in the proposal. The number is 100,000.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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