Policing and criminal justice are two of the issues on the campaign trail ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
The Republican and Democratic contenders differ over how they would handle public safety and criminals. Broadly speaking, Republicans want to increase punishments and policing to address crime while Democrats want to reform the system.
Here’s a brief look at where the major candidates stand on the issue.
Joe Biden
President Joe Biden has bucked some calls from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, saying, “We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police.”
At the same time, he has also pushed for greater accountability for when police “violate the public trust.”
In the White House, he has also backed community policing and violence intervention efforts and called for more mental and social services funding.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
During an appearance on “The Breakfast Club” radio program in September, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an attorney and activist running against Biden as a Democrat, said that he would support a federal anti-Black hate crime law.
Kennedy added that he would appoint an attorney general who would aggressively pursue investigations into alleged hate crimes and police misconduct.
His campaign website states that “we will transform the police. We will incentivize them to prevent violence, not make unnecessary arrests. We will train them in deescalation and mediation skills and partner them with neighborhood organizations.”
Marianne Williamson
Author and speaker Marianne Williamson, who is challenging Biden in the Democratic primary, has called for a rehabilitative approach to addressing crime, arguing that punitive accountability is “largely ineffective.”
Williamson supports community policing, decriminalizing addiction and investing in after-school programming as ways to tackle crime.
Donald Trump
During former President Donald’s Trump tenure, he played a major role in enacting the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform law that reduced some mandatory minimum prison sentences, gave judges the power to sentence nonviolent drug offenders to less time behind bars and more, such as increasing job training to lower recidivism rates.
Trump has supported rehabilitation-focused measures for nonviolent crimes — but, at the same time, he has advocated for the death penalty for drug dealers and repeatedly used hard-line rhetoric when talking about criminals.
You can read the full article at ABC News.