Dems won’t deliver on police reform — much less defunding
When Joe Biden signed a bill declaring Juneteenth a federal holiday last week, it was greeted with much fanfare. The president invited to the ceremony Opal Lee, the 94-year-old civil rights activist who has long campaigned for federal recognition. Vice President Kamala Harris waxed poetic about the law’s significance in a televised speech. In the media, it was hailed as a historic event. One outlet went so far as to treat it like the dawn of a new day, when partisan divisions gave way to a moment of unity: “At a time when Republicans and Democrats agree on virtually nothing, they came together this week to vote overwhelmingly in favor of making Juneteenth a federal holiday.”
But the response of many Black activists, academics and commentators was less enthusiastic.
Professor Treva Lindsey pointed out the hollowness of a “symbolic gesture” at a time when progress has stalled on material issues affecting the health and safety of Black people. “[With] little headway being made on securing a living wage and Black people still being assaulted and killed by police,” Linsdsey wrote “it’s hard for many of us to find substantive value in a new federal holiday.”
While the signing of the Juneteenth bill garnered a lot of national coverage, another move by the Biden Administration went largely unnoticed. Earlier in June, the president more than doubled proposed federal funding for police hiring in its budget request for the office Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS).
Created by the 1994 crime bill that Biden championed as a Senator, COPS was the main vehicle by which the federal government helped swell the ranks of state and local law enforcement. In its first five years, the annual budget of the COPS office was set at $1.4 billion on average, with the goal of recruiting 100,000 new officers across the country. But funding for COPS fell dramatically in the 2000s. In the past decade, yearly appropriations have consistently hovered around $200 million.
Biden pledged during the 2020 campaign to raise COPS funding by $300 million in an effort to distance himself from…
