President Biden will call on cities to use Covid-relief funds to hire more police in Friday afternoon remarks to mayors and police chiefs, the White House announced.
Biden will call on local officials to allocate more funding to police from the $1.9 trillion Covid stimulus package passed in March of last year. The White House said in a press release that Biden will note that roughly $10 billion in stimulus funds have already been allocated toward police and public safety projects, out of the $350 billion given to state and local governments in the stimulus plan.
The move comes amid rising concerns in the U.S. over violent crime, with one Gallup poll in April noting that a majority (53 percent) of respondents said they worry a “great deal” about crime for the first time since 2016. Biden administration officials indicated in a call with reporters that Biden would attempt to portray Democrats as better for police than Republicans who voted against the stimulus package, the New York Post reported on Friday.
“Congressional Republicans voted unanimously in Congress against every cent of the $10 billion that’s now being used by over 300 communities to put more cops on the beat and invest in neighborhood-based crime prevention programs,” an administration official said on the call.
Biden is attempting to get ahead of a potential crime surge, since crime generally rises in summer.
“One of the reasons why the president wants to speak now was both because we are approaching another summer and he wants to stress the priority of using these dollars for public safety and violence prevention,” an administration official said, according to NBC.
Biden used his State of the Union address to call for more police funding, a year and a half after massive street protests and riots following the death of George Floyd saw calls from left-wing Democrats to “defund the police.” Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) warned that “we can’t police away homelessness” during her response to the State of the Union, while Representative Cori Bush (D., Mo.) called to “defund the police” on Twitter following the speech.
While the Covid-relief bill was not initially pitched as a boon for police funding, Biden began pivoting toward that position as crime rose in major cities around the country and his approval rating began to fall.