Sure, I certainly do. I also recall Kamala Harris trying to obfuscate that support at nearly the same time.
But given the Winston Smithing of Harris’ record underway this week by the Protection Racket Media, I didn’t expect CNN to remember it. But here we are:
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Vice President Kamala Harris voiced support for “defund the police” in a radio interview in June 2020 amidst nationwide protests for police reform, just months before denouncing the movement after she had joined the Biden presidential campaign.
Harris said in the June radio interview the movement “rightly” called out the amount of money spent on police departments instead of community services such as education, housing, and healthcare, emphasizing that more police did not equate to more public safety.
“This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” Harris said on a New York-based radio program “Ebro in the Morning” on June 9, 2020, adding that US cities were “militarizing police” but “defunding public schools.”
Nor is that the only example cited by CNN. They also mention Harris’ praise for then-mayor Eric Garcetti’s decision to cut $150 million from the chronically underfunded budget of the Los Angeles Police Department in the immediate wake of the George Floyd riots. At the same time, Harris went on Good Morning America on June 9, 2020 to defend the Defund the Police movement, and attack its critics as spreading “fear” about rethinking the public-safety paradigm. Harris told Stephanopoulos that schools and jobs would mean less need for police, and explicitly endorsed Garcetti’s LAPD budget cut:
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Harris kept insisting that “we have defunded public schools in America” and implied that the money went to police instead. That’s a ludicrous claim, especially in Los Angeles. In the six years preceding the Floyd riots, LAUSD spending per pupil rose from $8400 to $11,560, an increase of almost thirty-eight percent in just six years. The district had a budget crisis not because of ‘investment’ in schools but because the costs of pensions and retiree benefits went from 24% of the budget to 33% of the budget over the same period.
In just the single year before the Floyd riots, the Census Bureau reported that per-pupil spending had increased 5% nationwide. Their revenue increased at almost the same rate:
According to new Annual Survey of School System Finances tables, released today by the U.S. Census Bureau, per pupil spending for elementary and secondary public education (pre-K through 12th grade) for all 50 states and the District of Columbia increased by 5.0% to $13,187 per pupil during the 2019 fiscal year, compared to $12,559 per pupil in 2018. This is the largest increase in more than a decade. Data for this report covers the fiscal year before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The spending increase was due in part to an overall increase in revenue. In 2019, public elementary and secondary schools received $751.7 billion from all revenue sources, up 4.5% from $719.0 billion in 2018.
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Harris spent the summer of 2020 demagoguing on behalf of Defund the Police, until Joe Biden added her to the ticket at the Democrat National Convention. She made ludicrous claims to support reducing law enforcement resources, especially in urban environments that had been relatively successful until then in keeping crime rates at historic modern lows. The result? An explosion of both violent and property crime that only recently has begun to subside, and only because cities reversed the policies that Harris championed at the time.
At least CNN reports this honestly from its archives. In Minneapolis, the local CBS affiliate WCCO attempted to claim this week that Harris had no connection to a bail fund that freed a Floyd rioter who later went on to commit murder. That immediately drew a community note from Twitter, but RNC Research dug further and found an interview with Harris where she was confronted on the issue — an interview by WCCO, in fact, from 2022:
Trump falsely accuses Harris of donating to Minnesota Freedom Fund, bailing out “dangerous criminals” https://t.co/5yrcEmZB8c
— WCCO | CBS News Minnesota (@WCCO) July 25, 2024
You clowns literally asked her about it pic.twitter.com/KIBR8uMSFb https://t.co/IQ5SOU6XNx
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 26, 2024
The problem with the MFF was that the riots in the Twin Cities were not “peaceful protests.” They weren’t even “mostly peaceful.” The riots cost lives and resulted in billions of dollars in destruction, and the economic collapse of Minneapolis in its wake. The MFF, which Harris actively promoted at the time and since, did not restrict its bail funds to non-violent defendants either. (Not to mention that the police were too overwhelmed to arrest people for just standing around and holding signs, of course.)
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And yes, as of this morning, the tweet promoting the MFF still lives on Harris’ Twitter account:
If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota. https://t.co/t8LXowKIbw
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 1, 2020
This is who Harris is — an ill-informed, undisciplined shill for the radical Left. And too many in the Protection Racket Media have already begun a Soviet-style culling of the archives to hide Harris’ history and true nature from voters in this cycle as their part in The Anointment. Kudos to CNN for resisting the impulse, at least in this instance.