Defunding police departments does not mean getting rid of police departments, which Democrats will not support, but instead, taking measures to reform and demilitarize the nation's departments, Sen. Kamala Harris said Tuesday.
"There needs to be accountability and consequence for anyone who breaks the law and breaks the rules, and so what we’re talking about in our package of bills is doing just that," the California Democrat said on ABC's "Good Morning America." "Separately, we really do have to get to a point where we agree that the status quo way of thinking about achieving safety is really wrong when it assumes that the best way to achieve more safety is to put more police on the streets. It’s just wrong."
The senator and former prosecuting attorney said instead, she supports investing in communities to allow them to become "more healthy and therefore more safe" so that fewer police are needed on the nation's streets.
"What we’re seeing in America is many cities spend over 1/3 of their entire city budget on policing, but meanwhile we’ve been defunding public schools for years in America," Harris said. "We’ve got to re-examine what we’re doing with Americans’ taxpayer dollars."
Stopping the militarization of police doesn't mean getting rid of police departments, she indeed, "but we have to be practical about this."
Meanwhile, she insisted that the thousands of people who have been taking to the streets to protest are speaking out against a "long-standing issue in America that needs to be addressed, and it can be done in a way that does not require us to create fear in people."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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