Not at all.
Calls for reform in police SOPs are different from requests for funding changes, and they
persist across partisan lines. However, I do think there was initial pressure in June on most establishment Democrats (except maybe Biden, Karen Bass, and a few others) to be less vocal about not supporting initiatives to defund the police in order to avoid immediate political suicide. This seems to have worked out on the national level, despite GOP attempts to misconstrue anything less that vocal rejection as support.
If we’re talking about existing partisan defunding efforts, look no further than our current administration, which has repeatedly pressed for budget cuts to law enforcement spending. Just this year,
President Trump’s most recent budget plan requested a $
465 million budget cut to state and local law enforcement initiatives coordinated under the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs. This included a 58% cut to a law enforcement recruitment and training initiative.
To contrast,
the incoming Biden administration plans to not only avoid defunding the police but to
invest at least $300 million into the hiring and education of even more law enforcement officers, along with pushing an additional
$20 billion towards crime prevention and recidivism reduction efforts.
The rhetoric pushed by either side to draw the dividing lines and frame how people should see the ‘opposition’ is its own game. It is one that is not designed to encourage praising the other’s successes or critiquing one’s own faults – much less to bring a nation together on the willingness to do those two things.
Also, welcome back. You should tell that Heine in your pic that all it needs to sort that specific Corona problem is a lime.
