President Donald Trump on Monday sent a clear message during a White House roundtable with members of law enforcement: The police are doing a “fantastic” job, ABC News writes.
“There won’t be defunding, there won’t be dismantling of our police and there is not going to be any disbanding of our police,” he said at the afternoon event.
“We want to make sure we don’t have any bad actors in there, and sometimes, you’ll see some horrible things like we witnessed recently, but 99 — I say 99.9, but let’s go with 99% of them are great, great people, and they’ve done jobs that are record setting — record setting,” Trump said.
The President repeated that country’s current crime statistics are “among the best numbers we’ve ever had in terms of recorded history.”
“There’s a reason for less crime, it’s because we have great law enforcement. I’m very proud of them,” he added.
Trump made the comments surrounded by top administration officials and half a dozen external participants that included attorneys general from Florida and Kentucky, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and representatives of police departments in Illinois and Colorado.
Attorney General William Barr said federal law enforcement understands distrust of the criminal justice system and acknowledged that for most of U.S. history, the law was discriminatory.
“Law enforcement fully understands and has understood for some time, the distrust that exists in the African American community toward the criminal justice system,” Barr said, adding that he is “optimistic” for future reforms.
After the President’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner spoke, Trump called him “my star.”
“Hopefully at this time, where there’s a lot of people in the country who are feeling different pain and feeling different concerns, law enforcement can be a leader and coming together and helping us work towards bringing solutions that could bring this country forward,” said Kushner.
The roundtable comes on the heels of Minneapolis City Council announcing Sunday that it would disband the city’s police force in the wake of Floyd’s death and long-standing issues with police conduct.
“They want to end the police department — quote end the police department in Minneapolis — end. What does that mean? End it,” Trump said, noting he saw reports in the papers. “They abandoned their police precinct, something I’ve never seen before. You had a mayor that asked them to abandon, and now they’ve abandoned the mayor, it looks like.”
Trump called it the “opposite of far thinking” but said once he brought in the National Guard “it was like magic.”
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