As a growing movement calls for defunding the police,
Joe Biden is pushing to increase police budgets.
In an op-ed for USA Today,
he called for 300 million more dollars to go toward 
so-called community policing.
Biden wrote, “I do not support defunding police.
The better answer is to give police departments
the resources they need to implement meaningful
reforms, and to condition other federal dollars
on completing those reforms.”
Biden is so out of touch on this question
and many others.
It’s really depressing.
What we can hope for with a Biden administration
is that he is surrounded by people smarter
and more committed and clearer than he is.
And I hope that that will be true.
I think he can also be pushed.
I mean, I was heartened by the unity task
forces that were set up several weeks ago
with people like AOC and Pramila Jayapal and
others, Sara Nelson.
I was very heartened by that.
I don’t know what’s happened to those
task forces.
I see the new DNC Platform Committee is not
inclusive of all those progressive voices.
But yeah, I mean, that’s extremely out of
touch.
You know, Mariame Kaba wrote a brilliant piece
in The New York Times a couple weeks ago,
really one of our former Chicago activists,
now in New York, but who has done so much
research, along with Angela Davis and Ruthie
Gilmore and others, around abolition, both
of prisons and police.
And she lays out the case that many of the
reforms, and including bloating police budgets,
have only pulled police forces toward more
violence, toward more both dangerous and incompetent
interventions in situations where other skills
and other interventions are necessary.
So, I don’t know that Biden has read that
literature, but I don’t really think it’s
a question of education.
I think he has to be pushed with enormous
resolve and enormous force by the movement
that’s growing, that people want defunding
and want funding of other kinds of services
and interventions in our communities.
