Whether to fund or defund the police is a critical issue for our democracy. President Biden seems to think that white, middle-America is his base, and if they want more police funding, they should have it (State of the Union Address). As American as apple pie. But it won’t unite a broken American civil society.
Calling for police funding kicks Black America in the teeth and sends a chill into the people of color and Indigenous communities as well. That’s a lot of Americans. It says we are not listening to you. We will let the oozing sores of slavery and land theft go unhealed. We will protect the systems that killed George Floyd and all who came before him and those that have followed since. Even worse, we will give shelter and support to the murderers, while we talk about uniting the country.
Unite whom to whom? And in the name of what?
Defund the police means, “Take your knee off my neck.” Couldn’t Biden at least acknowledge the harm done and create a commission to study it? HR 40 would do that and it is already a bill in Congress. Biden could have asked the country to get behind that effort.
Biden, instead, has called for increasing the funds for police, leading the whole country back down the dirty path of past wrongs. If Black lives mattered even in theory, we would be looking at how to dismantle (defund) an institution that has kept the country divided.
Sherrill Hogen
Charlemont