We have all heard it for over a year...dems screeching, wailing, destroying businesses and pillaging, and demanding defunding or getting rid of the police! NOW, in yet another liberal twist...they attempt to blame it on Republicans! Unreal how dems just LIE about everything and expect no one to call them on it!
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In a stunning contradiction of all known facts and evidence, a senior Biden administration official claimed Sunday that it’s Republicans who’ve defunded the police. White House advisor Cedric Richmond offered the false claim while being questioned by Fox News host Chris Wallace over President Joe Biden’s plan to ostensibly deal with the crime wave affecting cities across the country.
Republicans have pushed back on the plan because it doesn’t address any of the blue state/city policies believed to be responsible for the crime wave, including the decriminalization of low-level offenses, the elimination of bail, the automatic release of repeat felons and the defunding/demoralization of the police.
Confronted with this criticism on Fox News’ “Fox News Sunday,” Richmond made the audacious claim that these policies are the byproducts of Republican governance.
“Let’s talk about who defunded the police. When we were in Congress last year trying to pass an emergency relief plan for cities that were cash-strapped and laying off police and firefighters, it was the Republicans who objected to it,” he said.
“And in fact, they didn’t get funding until the American Rescue Plan, which our plan allowed state and local governments to replenish their police departments and do the other things that are needed.”
He added, “So look, Republicans are very good at staying on talking points of who says defund the police, but the truth is they defunded the police, we funded crime intervention at a whole bunch of other things.”
Listen below to the remarkably false comments:
Everything Richmond said was either a lie or gross distortion.
Not mentioned by him or brought up by Wallace was the fact that Republicans rejected the Democrats’ spending proposal last year because of all of the unrelated Democrat goodies it’d contained.
Instead Republicans forged ahead with the CARES Act, which also provided funding to police department across the states. In fact, after it was signed into law by then-President Donald Trump, leftists took to complaining about cops benefiting from it.
“Using stimulus from the multi-trillion-dollar CARES Act, which passed in March 2020, the Department of Justice has awarded at least $845.8 million of emergency grants to state and local law enforcement officers across the U.S. and its colonized territories,” Rolling Stone magazine lamented at the time.
“The relief has gone to more than 1,800 of these agencies, ranging from $30,000 boosters for small-town cops to tens of millions of dollars for a single police department in states like Florida and Texas.”
In addition, the defunding, neutering and demoralization of the police has been conducted primarily on the state and local level thanks to Democrat politicians endorsing and supporting violent Black Lives Matter riots, prosecuting police officers for the supposed crime of fatally shooting violent suspects and cutting them out of their city budgets.
To Wallace’s credit, he pointed this out to Richmond.
“I think the point that Sen. Graham and some Republicans make, beyond just the question of funding, is that there has been an attack on the police as if they are part of the problem, especially from some Democrats,” he said.
“I also want to talk about the decline in prosecutions and have got some numbers here. According to one study, more than 90 percent of the charges against people protesting and rioting after George Floyd’s murder were dropped in most cities.”
He added, “In New York, the ban on cash bail has resulted in the majority of people who are arrested getting released. Doesn’t that send exactly the wrong signals both to police and to the criminals who are being arrested?”
Yes, it does.
Here’s how Butler County, Ohio Sheriff Richard Jones put it during a Fox News interview last fall: “Police are under attack. They’re allowed to go home. These politicians are putting police out there as targets, where they can have projectiles thrown at them, fireworks, professional fireworks shot at them. Knock their eyes out. Assault them.”
It’s Democrat prosecutors who’ve released violent BLM/Antifa rioters, it’s Democrat prosecutors who’ve tried to railroad the careers of good officers and it’s Democrat policies that have led to an epidemic of cops resigning from the force.
“Thousands of police officers nationwide have headed for the exits in the past year. A survey of almost 200 police departments indicated that retirements were up 45 percent and resignations rose by 18 percent in the year from April 2020 to April 2021 when compared with the previous 12 months,” The New York Times reported last week.
But instead of taking aim at any of the Democrats’ disastrous policies, Biden’s plan focuses entirely on going after guns.
“It’s time to ban assault weapons again. The president supports that, he’s asked Congress to do that and you have to look at access to guns when you talk about fighting violent crime,” Richmond argued during his discussion with Wallace.
He also denied the link between violent BLM/Antifa riots and the crime surge.
“Those that are rioting and looting, which the president has said from the beginning of the campaign that they should be held accountable, but that’s not causing a spike in murders, homicides, gun violence. That’s guns causing that increase,” he said.
Yet the actual facts suggest that the worst crime surges have been in cities where the violent rioters were welcomed by local politicians with open arms, particularly Minneapolis.