Law and order and the presidential campaign

WASHINGTON — Heading into the 2020 presidential election, President Donald Trump and his advisers planned to run a campaign largely focused on the state of the economy. But as the coronavirus spread throughout the United States and unemployment rates rose, the campaign switched its approach this summer to rally behind a message of "law and order."

Amid protests calling for police reform sparked by the death of George Floyd and other high-profile cases of police brutality, Trump and former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden have presented contrasting visions for policing and criminal justice reform in America.

Trump has labeled himself as "your president of law and order," casting himself as an ally and defender of rank-and-file police officers and trying to depict Democrats as soft on crime.

"Americans want law and order," Trump said during a June speech at the White House. "They demand law and order. They may not say it, they may not be talking about it, but that's what they want. Some of them don't even know that's what they want, but that's what they want."

Biden, who as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was a leading architect of the 1994 federal crime bill that imposed tougher federal prison sentences, has repeatedly argued that Trump bears responsibility for episodes of violence and looting that have erupted in several cities over the past few months, saying Trump’s rhetoric has fueled division.

"He keeps telling us if he was president you’d feel safe," Biden said in a June speech in Pittsburgh. "Well, he is president, whether he knows it or not."

The presidential race has brought to the forefront long-simmering tensions about the future direction of criminal justice in the country, said William Jones, a historian at the University of Minnesota who has studied the history of police unions.

"Trump’s approach has been that any criticism of the police is someone in favor of anarchy, that if you criticize the police at all, then you just have no respect for law and order, but in the face of repeated, really horrific examples of police brutality, that position becomes hard to square with reality," said Jones. "For the Democrats, in part because of the way in which Trump has sort of polarized things, it becomes difficult for them to take what used to be a fairly nuanced position — that we could have public safety and law and order without police brutality, without racist policies — and try to find some sort of middle ground. That middle ground is hard to navigate these days."

Funding the police

Trump has accused Biden of supporting growing calls by liberal activists and criminal justice scholars to "defund the police," but Biden has repeatedly said he does not support those calls. Activists contend that money should be steered instead to social service programs aimed at addressing the underlying causes of crime such as poverty and mental health issues.

Biden has proposed a $300 million boost in federal spending to local departments, and has noted that the Trump administration proposed cutting nearly $500 million in federal funding to local law enforcement programs under Trump’s 2021 budget plan. The proposal has not been adopted by Congress.

The Trump campaign has pushed back, arguing that the funding cuts in question stem from a decades-old initiative known as COPS (The Community Oriented Policing Services program) that also saw funding dip under the Obama administration. Even so, the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research bank for lawmakers, wrote in a May 2019 report that the decline in funding for COPS was a result of Congress restructuring the program and directing some of the money to other local law enforcement grants such as money aimed at helping local crime labs address backlogs in analyzing DNA.

Law enforcement support

On the campaign trail Trump has repeatedly touted the endorsement of police union groups, including New York City’s Police Benevolent Association and the national Fraternal Order of Police, and argued that Biden "can’t name one" law enforcement group that has endorsed him, despite the vice president receiving the support of individual law enforcement leaders.

"My agenda is anti-crime and pro-cop all the way, and that's what it's got to be," Trump said at a June event where he accepted the PBA’s endorsement.

In September, a bipartisan group of more than 175 current and former law enforcement leaders including police chiefs and prosecutors endorsed Biden, stating that "more cops have died of COVID-19 this year than on patrol."

Biden said at an August campaign event: "I want to get police more money in order to deal with the things they badly need, from making sure they have access to community policing, that they have also in the departments social workers, psychologists, people who in fact can handle those god-awful problems that a cop has to have four degrees to handle."

Plans for reform

Biden has been forced to defend his role crafting the 1994 crime bill, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, that some Democrats now contend was too tough on crime. Criminal justice reform advocates say the law led to disproportionate incarceration rates among Black and Latino men. At the second Presidential debate, Biden called elements of the bill a "mistake," and has since vowed to push for a "reduction" in mass incarceration by focusing on rehabilitation programs.

"Yes, I’m in favor of law and order," Biden told Trump during the first presidential debate in September. "Law and order with justice, where people get treated fairly."

Trump in June signed an executive order calling for the creation of a national database to track police misconduct and vowed to provide federal funding to aid police departments with training officers in de-escalation tactics. Democrats argue that the plan doesn’t go far enough to combat systemic racism and issues of inequality in the criminal justice system.

Meena Bose, director of the Hofstra University's Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency, said that while Trump may be taking a page from Richard Nixon’s successful 1968 campaign playbook, to make "law and order" a central campaign theme, Trump risks running on "a very narrow platform," at a time where polls show a majority of Americans support police reforms, such as banning the use of chokeholds and racial profiling.

"What we're seeing in the 2020 presidential race is that the issues are being cast in a way that you're either with law and order, or you're against law and order, and that is an unfair characterization," Bose said. "It misses the scope of the issues that we need to address as a society to ensure that the American public stays safe."