Biden calls for retraining cops: ‘Why should you always shoot with deadly force?’
January 16, 2023
President Biden started his speech by thanking Al Sharpton for his "partnership"President Biden on Monday called for police officers to be retrained so they’re taught not to use deadly force in every situation that requires them to fire their weapon.
The 80-year-old president’s comments came during the National Action Network’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Breakfast in Washington, DC, as Biden blasted Senate Republicans for blocking a police reform bill in 2021 that would’ve restricted the use of deadly force by law enforcement officers.
“We have to retrain cops,” Biden said. “Why should you always shoot with deadly force? The fact is if you need to use your weapon, you don’t have to do that.”
Biden noted that his May 2022 executive order on police reform included many of the measures sought in the failed George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
“I did the only thing I could do,” Biden said after the bill named in honor of the unarmed black man killed by white police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis in 2020 failed to reach his desk.
“I signed a historic executive order that included key elements of that bill at the federal level,” he said of the order that “bans chokeholds and greatly restricts no-knock warrants … creates a national database for officer misconduct and tightens the use-of-force policies to emphasize deescalation.”
“We have to retrain cops,” Biden said. “Why should you always shoot with deadly force?”
Biden made a similar suggestion about the use of deadly force by police on the presidential campaign trail in 2020, at the height of the George Floyd riots, arguing that police officers should be trained to shoot threatening individuals “in the leg instead of the heart.”
“Instead of standing there and teaching a cop when there’s an unarmed person coming at them with a knife or something, shoot them in the leg instead of in the heart,” Biden told African American community leaders in June of 2020 at Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Delaware.
Biden added that “there’s a lot of different things that can change” in police training.
The president’s comments on Monday elicited condemnation on Twitter from some groups that support law enforcement officers.
Biden believes many things can change in police training.
“It’s IRRESPONSIBLE comments like this that cause problems where there does not need to be any,” Melissa Robey, founder of police advocacy organization We Back Blue, wrote in a tweet.
“Does Biden talk to police to see why they do what they do? Biden doesn’t understand policing,” John Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said Monday.
“If he wants to increase retention, don’t immediately release criminals & make police feel pointless,” Lott Jr. added, referring to the struggles police departments nationwide have had keeping officers on the force.
Police reportedly killed 1,185 people in 2022, according to a data analysis by Mapping Police Violence. Less than 10% of the cases where an individual was killed by police involved an unarmed subject, according to the group.
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Blue meanie Joe’s divisive cop tirade is the president’s latest battle with facts
January 17, 2023
President Joe Biden repeatedly shares alleged memories trying to
relate to Black Americans, that many believe are lies. We have reached the stage in Joe Biden’s presidency where he tells lies about himself and it’s no longer news. Such was the case over the weekend.
The president marked the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday with predictable chameleon-like claims to black audiences. He insisted at King’s storied Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta that, as a child and young adult, he routinely attended a black church after going to Catholic Mass.
In a second speech, in Washington, he claimed to have fought against South African apartheid and was a civil rights activist who marched to desegregate Delaware.
His Walter Mitty fantasies might be endearing if he weren’t the president of United States and if he didn’t have such a sketchy relationship with the truth on serious matters throughout his career. Remember, this is a man who once plagiarized parts of another man’s life story and tried to make it his own!
This is also the same man who implausibly insists he never once spoke to his son Hunter about his multimillion-dollar paydays with foreign firms and governments.
Now, at the ripe age of 80, it’s reasonable to wonder if Biden can separate fact from fiction, or if flights of fancy and convenient political lies are so jumbled in his addled brain that no one in the White House can untangle them or persuade him to stop repeating falsehoods.
All that aside, Biden did say a few very important things in his weekend pander-fest. They were demonstrably false and so inflammatory, they can’t be ignored.
“We have to retrain cops as to why should you always shoot for that with deadly force? The fact is, if you need to use your weapon, you don’t have to do that,” he said Monday.
The president was talking to an audience of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, and like both Biden and Sharpton, the claim is long past its prime. Worse, it is rooted in ignorance and anti-police bias.
The inference is that trigger-happy cops needlessly kill when, if they were better trained, they would aim for an arm or a leg. That way, the assailant could be stopped but not killed.
It is a prime argument of the “defund the police” crowd that
routinely paints cops as cold-hearted killers. Biden says he rejects
the defund idea, but then repeats one of the movement’s central tenets.
Moreover, the idea that cops can always shoot to wound is a Hollywood fantasy that’s been debunked repeatedly by police officers and those who train them. They warn that the view can embolden some perps to believe they don’t have to worry about pulling a gun on a cop and influences the public to believe that fatal police encounters are almost always avoidable if only the cops were better trained and more humane.
Biden’s comments support the idea of defunding the police, that paints cops as cold-hearted killers.
Yet here we are, with the president of the United States believing and saying such a stupid thing.
If he said it in private, the offense would be bad enough. That Biden said it publicly to a black audience, effectively priming it to distrust and dislike police, is unforgivable. It also a smear on every law-enforcement officer in America.
It echoes his 2012 race-flaming campaign speech to a black audience when he said Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney wants to “put you all back in chains.”
Cops and others in law enforcement are authorized to use deadly force in certain circumstances, but it is a lie that they are taught to shoot-to-kill. Instead, when they perceive a serious risk to themselves or others and draw their weapons, they are trained to aim for the biggest body mass to stop the immediate threat.
That happens to be the chest, home of the heart and lungs, and shots there can be fatal.
Irresponsible talk
Still, the police motive is not to kill the assailant. The motive is to save the lives of the innocent.
Biden must know that, or certainly should. Instead, as he faces a special-counsel probe over his mishandling of classified documents, he plays the race card and gives a clear suggestion cops routinely opt for “deadly force” when other options are available.
Biden greats supporters after speaking at the National Action Network’s Annual Martin Luther King Day.
And he didn’t stop there, trotting out another dated trope to make himself look like a hero to his audience.
He urged “a fresh approach to how we recruit, how we hire, how we train, how we promote and how we retain, retain in law enforcement that come from the neighborhoods that they serve and know the people they’re charged to protect.”
He obviously aimed to draw a provocative image of an all-white police force acting as an occupying army in non-white neighborhoods. In doing so, he revealed his own willful ignorance.
Take the NYPD. It has been majority-minority for nearly two decades. And New York has a black mayor, a black female police commissioner and nonwhite officers in numerous positions of authority.
Many cities and their police forces have similar racial make-ups. Does Biden know any of that? Does he care?
From there, he went on to sound another false note when he claimed, “Now, I know a lot of people say community police is not a good idea.”
Nobody says that, certainly nobody in policing. Yet he was just getting started, adding that people in a black community in Delaware he claims to be familiar with “want cops who are fair. They want cops who know their communities. They want cops who are going to be doing it by the numbers.”
Once again, the suggestion is that most cops are not fair and don’t know or understand the people in the communities where they work. The assumption was that all black Americans agree with him, or should.
As he infamously said in another context, if you don’t, “you ain’t black.”
Cornered animals are dangerous animals, and Biden’s desperation is showing. He faces, in addition to the special-counsel probe, a GOP House vowing to investigate his role in his family’s influence-peddling schemes.
So far, he’s behaving the way you would expect a guilty swamp creature to behave: attack your opponents’ motive and tell your supporters they will lose everything they hold dear if the other side wins.
It’s shameful. And a disgrace to the man of peace he supposedly was honoring to use the holiday as an excuse to smear the brave Americans who, regardless of their race, make up the Thin Blue Line.
3 comments:
What's wrong with PHASERS ON STUN? What, you mean they don't exist yet. Damn shame. Maybe the cops should just shoot the guns out of the bad guy's hands. The Lone Ranger and Gene Autrey did it all the time.
"Save the life of the innocent", yeah that's why a cop shot 6 innocents when he thought he might be in danger.
Really it's not many people in the grand scheme of things.
Hi-Ho-Silver!
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