Joe Biden Pushes Back on Trump’s ‘Defund Police’ Attacks: ‘They Don’t Need Less Funding, They Need More’

In a pair of local interviews, former Vice President and current Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden pushed back on President Donald Trump’s false claim that the ex-VP supports “defunding the police.”

On Tuesday, anchor Jamie Boll of North Carolina’s WBTV asked Biden about recent ads that the Trump campaign has been running.

“The president’s campaign is running an ad here in North Carolina, it essentially says if you win, crime calls will go unanswered, because you support defunding the police,” Boll said, and asked “Where do you stand on that issue?”

“That has never been my position, it is not my position now,” Biden said. “Where I stand on it is police have to clean up their act.”

He added that under his plan, “the on;y thing that will happen” if police don’t meet standards is “they’ll lose some federal funding.”

“But if they do what they have to do, they in fact will get all the funding, and they need more funding, not less funding,” Biden continued. “They need more help. They need psychologists, they need people who are going to help them deal with those crises that exist. The vast majority of law enforcement officers are decent honorable people, and they do a hell of a job and they risk their life protecting us.”

In another interview, with Arizona’s KPNX, Biden brought up the issue unprompted. Asked how his thinking on policing has changed since the 1994 crime bill, Biden said “Well, it hasn’t changed a whole lot in the sense that I don’t think we should be defunding police departments. I think we should be holding police departments responsible.”

He echoed his statements to Boll, and went on to add that “we need police, we need police departments, but we also need basic fundamental rules. The moment’s come for a wake-up call, a call to action to confront and end racial injustice that’s prevalent in this country as long as we’ve all been around.”

Watch the clips above via KPNX and WBTV.