Can Biden tackle rising crime without abandoning police reform promise? | Joe

During a visit to 1 Police Plaza, the headquarters of the NYPD in downtown Manhattan, Joe Biden asked officer Sumit Sulan to stand as he praised his bravery. Last month, the rookie officer shot and killed a man who mortally wounded two of his colleagues while responding to a domestic dispute in Harlem.

The deaths of the two young officers, Jason Rivera, 22, and Wilbert Mora, 27, was one of several violent episodes that have shaken New York and tested its new mayor, former police captain Eric Adams.

“I admire the hell out of all of you,” Biden, flanked by Adams and other elected officials, said to the rows of uniformed blue seated behind him.

“The answer is not to defund the police,” he continued to applause. “It’s to give you the tools, the training, the funding to be partners, to be protectors.”

Later, the presidential motorcade crossed the East River to Queens, where Biden met with a violence intervention group and community leaders at Public School 111, in a classroom decorated for Black History Month.

“We can’t just talk about violence and not talk about students feeling safe in schools,” K Bain, the founder and executive director of Community Capacity Development, a community violence intervention program, told the president.

“I agree,” Biden interjected quietly, as Bain advocated for a community-based approach to reducing violence.

The meetings at 1 Police Plaza and PS 111 underscored the complex public safety – and political – challenge confronting Democratic leaders from New York’s city hall to the White House and many other places across the US.

Amid rising crime, Democrats are under pressure to prove that they are aggressively confronting the issue, an increasingly salient concern among voters, without abandoning their promises of police reform and accountability in response to the repeated police killings of Black Americans and a history of racism in law enforcement.

In New York, Biden sent dual messages. He forcefully asserted his support for law enforcement, loudly distancing himself from activist calls to “defund the police,” which emerged during the summer of racial justice protests after the killing of George Floyd and that Republicans are mercilessly using to try to brand the president and his party as unconcerned with public safety. But Biden also sought to convey that he was listening to – and even learning from – the communities of color most impacted by the pandemic-era violence.

“We all want safety, right?” said Quentin James, the president of Collective PAC, an organization dedicated to electing African American candidates. “Safety from criminals but also safety from police overreach. It’s not either/or. It has to be both/and.”

Gun violence and homicides rose sharply in 2020 and 2021, with Black and Latino communities hit the hardest. Though the toll remains far lower than it was in the early 1990s, the jump from 2019 to 2020 represented the largest single-year spike in homicides in modern history, according to the CDC.

“This is not a make-believe kind of thing,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a…