Police Unions Abandon Biden After He Promotes Cop Reform

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden earlier in his career demonstrated support for police officers and their organized groups, but some in the law enforcement community claim he’s switched views amid the George Floyd riots.

Officers are finding themselves on the receiving end of mass violence in the midst of countrywide demonstrations that have resulted from the untimely death of George Floyd, who died after an officer kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes per a viral video. Biden’s change of perspective has been noticed by several top brass law enforcement figures, Politico finds.

“For Joe Biden, police are shaking their heads because he used to be a stand-up guy who backed law enforcement,” Bill Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, which endorsed Obama in 2008 and 2012, told Politico. “But it seems in his old age, for whatever reason, he’s writing a sad final chapter when it comes to supporting law enforcement.”

“There’s no time to waste — we need to get to work immediately on real police reform,” Biden said on Twitter Wednesday.  “Congressman @Hakeem_Jeffries has a bill to outlaw chokeholds. Congress should put it on President Trump’s desk in the next few days. Period.”

Biden voted yes to several bills dubbed “tough on crime” before his presidential bid — one of them being the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, better known as the 1994 crime bill. The legislation increased both the number of police on the street and the scale of state prisons, and it also substantially harshened penalties surrounding violent offenses, according to a Fact Check report.

The bill was hallowed by officers around the country in a time where violence was on the rise. Recent statements from Biden suggest he will not be upholding the same values in 2020, as he indicated sympathies for reforming the law enforcement community rather than bolstering it.

Biden took to the podium Tuesday to promote “long overdue concrete changes” to the police system including restricting “weapons of war” to combat criminals.

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Some officers like Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police and former in-house lobbyist for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, say they saw this coming in gradual shifts in Biden’s views on the issue.

“There are two evolutions in two directions. On law-and-order issues, Biden was right of center: the ‘94 crime bill, the Brady law and enhanced penalties. But as time has gone by, his positions have moderated, moderated, moderated to where we are today, where he would not be considered a law-and-order guy in the sense that law enforcement sees it,” Pasco told Politico.

Democratic Florida Rep. Val Demings, who has a likelihood to become Biden’s vice president, disagrees with the statements made by police unions.

“Law enforcement, firefighters know who Joe Biden is,” Demings told Politico. “They know who he is because he has stood with our public servants in the toughest time in their lives.”

The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation