President Joe Biden on Tuesday will lay out a $37 billion budget proposal for Congress to fund policing and crime prevention efforts across the country, a plan that would focus on hiring and retaining officers, intervention strategies, improving the criminal justice system and a call for further efforts to keep guns out of dangerous hands.
The announcement comes as violent crime remains high above pre-pandemic levels, with major cities’ police departments reporting a 50% increase in homicides compared to 2019.
Biden will lay out his “Safer America Plan” in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., on Tuesday, a little over a month since his COVID-19 diagnosis delayed an initial visit and announcement there.
“When it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer isn’t to defund the police. It’s to fund the police,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday.
The plan is a proposal for the president’s fiscal year 2023 budget, which Congress can consider.
The policing part of the plan includes nearly $13 billion to hire 100,000 officers over the next five years through the federal COPS Hiring Program.
The money would come in the form of grants “to recruit, train, support, and manage” the officers in “effective, accountable community policing,”
Community policing has long been a policy priority for Biden, and it partly involves assigning police officers to particular areas so they become connected to the local population.
The Safer America plan would also include $1 billion for training officers in a way that prioritizes “accountability, transparency, and the well-being of state and local officers,” plus separate money focused on officer well-being and retention.
The White House also pointed to executive actions already taken by the president to boost policing, such as one in May that focused on federal law enforcement agencies and asked them to review use of force within their ranks.
Biden on Tuesday will also turn the focus back to guns, two months after he signed into law the first sweeping, bipartisan reform law in decades.
The president is expected to call on Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, an effort he helped push through when he was a senator in 1994 before it expired in the early 2000s.
“The majority of Americans support this,” Jean-Pierre said Monday, later adding: “He’ll continue to fight for this as president.”
Biden’s Safer America plan would also include $1.7 billion for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to enforce gun laws, including by hiring more agents and investigators.
All of this comes as post-pandemic crime rates remain higher than in the years before COVID-19 largely shut down the country.
Homicides are up 50% midyear compared to 2019, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which includes police executives representing the largest U.S. cities.
Aggravated assaults are up 36% from the same period.
Gun deaths remain the most concerning factor, the MCCA reported. U.S. health officials recorded the highest number of firearm deaths ever in 2020, with an average of 124 people dying per day.
Asked why the announcement Tuesday would take place in Wilkes-Barre instead of a place like Philadelphia, where crime is more rampant, Jean-Pierre did not share any reasoning but instead highlighted that Biden would make the speech near his hometown of Scranton.
The Safer America plan also includes $700 million for crisis interventions related to mental health, plus a $15 billion for a proposed Accelerating Justice System Reform grant program that communities can use to do things like prevent violent crime, support formerly incarcerated Americans or expand co-responder programs to prevent officers from having to intervene in situations that may need something other than a law enforcement response.
