Two years into his presidency, Joe Biden finds himself caught between the push and pull of activist calls for
criminal justice
reform and the political reality that many voters feel unsafe and frustrated on the issue of public safety.
Biden took office amid a
spike in violence
that swept nearly every U.S. city. Entering the White House just months after race-related riots elevated radical police reform to the political mainstream, Biden has spent much of his time straddling two very different, and sometimes contradictory, approaches to criminal justice.
“Let’s not abandon our streets or choose between safety and equal justice,” Biden said last year during his State of the Union address. “Let’s come together to protect our communities, restore trust, and hold law enforcement accountable.”
Biden will speak before Congress once again Tuesday against the backdrop of high emotions in the aftermath of Tyre Nichols’s death at the hands of Memphis, Tennessee, police officers. The episode has renewed calls from the Left for police reform legislation that had died last session on Capitol Hill.
Nichols’s family will be sitting in the room with Biden as he gives this year’s State of the Union address.
But the issue of crime and policing overall has changed dramatically since Biden ran for the presidency.
The loudest voices in the national conversation are no longer advocating the dismantlement of law enforcement but are instead calling to strengthen it; the public’s general
attitude
about the safety of America’s streets has taken a sharp turn in the past two years.
Biden has the difficult task of balancing competing demands on the issue.
“During the last Democratic presidential primary when he was courting left-wing activists, he couldn’t run fast enough away from the 1994 crime bill that he previously bragged about co-sponsoring,” Colin Reed, a Republican strategist, told the Washington Examiner. “Now, with concerns about violent crime rising in the polls, Biden is going to wish he could have some of his old views back again, and that voters won’t see through the political maneuvering.”
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Voters rewarded some Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections for their focus on crime as a top campaign issue.
However, the state of crime in the United States is more complicated than the GOP’s messaging suggests.
Murders began to fall in some cities last year after increasing precipitously in 2020 and 2021. Murders increased or stayed the same as the year before in 12 of the country’s 30 largest cities in 2022, a Washington Examiner
analysis
found.
Other types of crime remained stubbornly high, such as gun-related offenses and, in some cities, carjackings.
Experts say the reasons why crime remains prevalent are many. School closures and a lack of social services allowed a worrying number of juveniles to drift into lawlessness during the pandemic.
Overloaded courts, slowed down by pandemic-era policies that dramatically reduced their schedules, kept some criminals out on the streets longer than they would have otherwise.
And liberal prosecutors have loosened penalties for many crimes that once put offenders behind bars.
Biden presides over a stark disconnect between the current criminal justice rhetoric of his party and the types of reforms sought by activists at the local level.
While Democrats have largely abandoned their least popular ideas nationally, some prosecutors they championed over the past few years continue to execute far-left policies locally.
In Manhattan, for example, District Attorney Alvin Bragg found himself
at odds
with Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) as she ran for a full term last year amid a nationwide backlash to progressive criminal justice reforms.
Bragg had vowed to stop prosecuting lower-level crimes and significantly limit pretrial detention.
Biden largely avoided siding with the wing of his party that pushed to defund police departments in the months before and shortly after he took office in 2021. He has taken pains to distance his administration from the most strident calls for reforms that could weaken public safety.
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Along with congressional Democrats, Biden attempted to cast his American Rescue Plan, aimed at easing the effects of the pandemic, as a pro-police bill because it gave cities and states relief funding that they could, in theory, put toward police departments.
But he has continued to indulge the activists who drive for fundamental changes to the system.
In last year’s State of the Union address, Biden touted the reforms he’d pushed for federal law enforcement officers, including a ban on chokeholds and a body camera requirement.
