Roll the Tape: Biden Supported “Defunding the Police”

This week, a new Rasmussen Reports survey confirms that a lopsided majority of Americans “see media a lot more eager to help Biden than Trump.”

By more than three-to-one, an overwhelming majority also affirms that Biden “has received the best treatment from the media so far,” and a majority also “expects most reporters to try to help Biden.”

Those results may possess an unsurprising “dog bites man” quality to anyone with even a glancing interest in political affairs.  Left-leaning media bias is by now well-established, which helps explain why public trust in media remains at historical lows.  The sheer audacity and near-unanimity of media bias in this year’s race, however, already appears unprecedented.

When even Fox News’s Chris Wallace shamelessly and stubbornly carries water for the Biden campaign and flagrantly distorts verifiable reality, one wonders how Americans don’t recognize with similar unanimity how the media favors Biden.  As crude as one may judge the term, it’s with good reason that the slur “fake news” maintains potency.

Last week, Wallace interviewed President Trump for an hour-long segment on “Fox News Sunday,” and one point of contention arose when Trump asserted that Biden supported the “Defund the Police” movement.  Wallace immediately insisted that Biden did not, which prompted Trump to seek confirmation from a unity declaration with former socialist opponent Bernie Sanders.

In the days since that interview, Wallace and others like Fox News’s Kirsten Fisher smugly went out of their way to highlight the dispute, as if it provided them some sort of “gotcha” triumph.  Perhaps Wallace believed that the absence of a “defund the police” commitment in the Biden-Sanders accord absolved him of error, but as a veteran newsman he should’ve known that other recent events confirmed Trump’s point.

Specifically, in a video interview earlier this month, Biden not only affirmed his support for the “Defund the Police” as its own proponents have defined it, but also referred to police as “the enemy.”

To recap, as civil unrest has continued in American cities over the past two months, at times becoming murderous riots, the more extreme elements of the lawless left initiated a “defund the police” movement.  In some places, that literally meant eradicating police forces entirely.

In short order, however, many leftists realized that abolishing police forces was a political loser across wide swaths of the partisan spectrum.  For decades now, police have remained one of only three public institutions (alongside the military and small businesses) in which majorities of Americans express confidence.

Accordingly, apologists quickly shifted to swearing that “defund the police” didn’t really mean abolishing the police (even though some continue to advocate precisely that), but rather redirecting substantial portions of police funding toward other institutions like social welfare case workers.

Here’s how CNN defined the term on June 17, before it became a potential landmine for Biden, in a piece entitled “There’s a Growing Call to Defund Police – Here’s What It Means”:

It’s as straightforward as it sounds:  Instead of funding a police department, a sizable chunk of a city’s budget is invested in communities, especially marginalized ones where much of the policing occurs…  

Some supporters of divestment want to reallocate some, but not all, funds away from police departments to social services and reduce their contact with the public to reduce the likelihood of police violence.  Those seeking to disband police consider defunding an initial step toward creating an entirely different model of community-led public safety.  The concept exists on a spectrum, and the two aren’t dichotomous but interconnected.  But both interpretations center on reimagining what public safety looks like – shifting resources away from law enforcement toward community resources…  

Thus, “defund the police” became shorthand for redirecting police resources, not necessarily abolishing police departments altogether.  And that’s precisely what is already occurring in cities like New York City under Mayor Bill DeBlasio, and in Los Angeles under Mayor Eric Garcetti.

In fact, here’s a headline from Newsweek, hardly a right-leaning publication:  “LA Mayor Faces Backlash for Defunding Police With $150 Million Budget Cut.”

Now let’s roll the tape on Joe Biden to see how his comments square with that definition.  In a July 11 interview with Now This News, interviewer Ady Barkan asked Biden directly whether he supported redirecting police funding in precisely the manner defined above:

Barkan:  We can reduce the responsibilities assigned to the police and redirect some of the funding for police into social services, mental health counseling and affordable housing…  Are you open to that kind of reform?  

Biden:  Yes, I proposed that kind of reform…  The last thing you need is an up-armored Humvee coming into a neighborhood.  It’s like the military invading!  They don’t know anybody.  They become the enemy…  

Barkan:  But do we agree that we can redirect some of the funding?  

Biden:  Yes!  Absolutely.  

But now that position has become a political liability, as captured by a separate Rasmussen survey released this week:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 66% of American adults now oppose reducing the police budget in the community where they live to channel that money into more social services.  That’s up from 59% in June when we first asked this question.  Just 23% favor defunding the cops where they live, down from 27% in the previous survey.  

A new ABC News/Washington Post survey similarly found that “only 40 percent support cutting funding to police in order to spend more on social services, while 55 percent oppose such a move.”

It’s therefore no wonder that Biden and his supporters have suddenly shifted direction and attempted to cover their tracks.  But that doesn’t excuse people like Chris Wallace or the rest of the increasingly shameless legacy media flagrantly attempting to assist him.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, the nation’s highest-ranking Democratic official, just referred to law enforcement officers as “stormtroopers,” openly comparing them to Nazi forces.  And the Biden campaign’s own supervising video producer Sara Pearl on June 1 tweeted simply “#DefundPolice,” and also tweeted “Please stop calling cops ‘pigs.’  Pigs are highly intelligent & empathetic animals who would never racially profile you.”

Birds of a feather flock together.

In contrast, the National Union of Police Organizations has endorsed President Trump, after twice supporting the Obama/Biden and Democrats in previous elections.

Apparently, they recognize something that people like Chris Wallace and other media apologists stubbornly refuse to admit.