WASHINGTON — As Joe Biden stood with the family of George Floyd on Monday in demanding police accountability, President Donald Trump also made clear where he stands, meeting with law enforcement officers and accusing Biden of undermining public safety.
Much of the nation is also taking a position, and a raft of recent polls indicates that it is not with Trump. The president finds himself with some of his lowest approval ratings since moving to the White House, facing an electorate that has swung sharply toward the belief that racism remains prevalent in America’s police departments — a view Trump said he rejects.
“Our police have been letting us live in peace, and we want to make sure we don’t have any bad actors in there, and sometimes we’ll see some horrible things like we witnessed recently, but I say 99.9 — let’s go with 99% of them — great, great people, and they’ve done jobs that are record-setting,” Trump said during a meeting Monday with police officials.
Biden, by contrast, spent an hour in Houston in a private meeting sharing the grief of the family of Floyd, the black man choked to death by a Minneapolis police officer two weeks ago — a videotaped killing that set off a wave of nationwide protest. Floyd’s funeral is planned for today.
“He listened, heard their pain and shared in their woe,” Benjamin Crump, the family’s lawyer, said in a statement on Twitter. “That compassion meant the world to this grieving family.”
The contrasting scenes reinforced the messages of the campaigns.
For the African American and liberal white voters on whom Democrats depend, Floyd’s killing has pushed far-reaching change in the nation’s police high on the national agenda.
By contrast, Trump’s conservative white followers consistently tell pollsters they do not believe police systemically treat African Americans unfairly.
In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, public opinion has shifted strongly against that view. About two-thirds of Americans say black and white people do not receive equal treatment from the police, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted as protests erupted. That’s up sharply from 38% in a 2015 YouGov survey. Several other recent polls have shown similar shifts.
Trump hopes to move the debate back in his direction by portraying Democrats as “radicals” intent on abolishing police departments.
On Monday, Biden and fellow Democrats found themselves carefully navigating around calls by activists to “defund” and “disband” police departments, which some Democrats worry could give Trump a fresh opening to drive a wedge between them and voters.
“This is where danger lurks for Biden,” said Ruy Teixeira, a political demographer at the liberal Center for American Progress. “People want to see the police do better, and they believe the complaints are justified. But people don’t hate the police. They don’t want to defund their local police departments.”
In practice, defunding proposals are more about reimagining, rather than retreating from, policing. The Minneapolis City Council, for example, could vote this week on a disbanding proposal that calls for replacing the city’s current police department with a community-based public safety system.
Camden, N.J., disbanded its police force in 2013 and replaced it with a countywide force. More recently, other cities have undertaken incremental initiatives to cut their police budgets and reinvest more in the black community.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti last week pledged that the city would find $250 million in cuts to “invest in jobs, in health, in education and in healing,” especially in communities of color. He said the cuts would include at least $100 million from the Los Angeles Police Department, which grew rapidly during the last two decades.
