Joe Biden had been poised Thursday to unveil a $37bn proposal for fighting crime, including funding to help US police departments hire and train an additional 100,000 officers over a five-year period, according to reports, though after contracting Covid he cancelled the speech where he planned to announce it.
The US president’s Safer America Plan would form part of his proposed 2023 budget and would require a green light from Congress, CNN reports. As well as the additional officers, it would reportedly include the launch of a $15bn grant initiative for states and localities to assist them in preventing violent offenses, and to “ease the burden on police officers by identifying non-violent situations that may merit a public health response or other response.”
It would also place an additional $5bn in community-based violence intervention initiatives, and include “additional commonsense steps” that would aim to stop the spread of guns, according to CNN.
Biden’s proposal would also request more funding for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He is also pushing Congress to ban assault weapons and bolster background checks for firearms.
One White House official said Biden’s planned speech at a visit to Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on Thursday was initially going to show a “clear contrast” with Republican members of Congress, and demonstrate how his party has “funded the police and taken action to fight crime while congressional Republicans have opposed these efforts at every turn”.
After Biden tested positive for Covid on Thursday, he cancelled the Pennsylvania trip. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that Biden was experiencing “mild symptoms” and has begun taking Paxlovid, an antiviral drug designed to reduce the severity of the disease.
Biden’s proposal was scheduled to be released before hotly contested midterm elections, where many Republicans have used rising concerns about crime to attack Democrats. The National Republican Committee announced in June that it will devote $52.3m to political ads for congressional candidates in top contests – some of which condemn Democrats for upticks in violent crime, the Washington Post reported.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a law and public policy institute, has noted that “violent crime and some types of property crime rose across the country in 2020 in communities of all types” but cautioned against drawing hasty conclusions about why.
“It is too soon to talk with precision about national crime trends in 2021, as the FBI has yet to publish national data,” the center said. “However, preliminary information suggests that increases in murder rates may have begun to slow.”
Many Democrats across the US are worried about whether their voting base thinks they are soft on crime. During the racial justice protests of 2020, some Democrats started to reconsider their views on criminal justice, but Republicans have since slammed the party as uncaring about violent crime, the New York Times noted, and many Democrats now publicly espouse support of law enforcement and rebuff language such as “defunding” the police. Among them is Nevada congresswoman Susie Lee, whom the Washington Post described as “on a list of House Democrats seen as vulnerable in November”.
“I always open these up and say I do not want to defund the police, and in fact have voted multiple times to increase funding to police departments,” Lee reportedly told police officers during a forum in June.
