Supporters of defunding the police say they are "not going away" just because Joe Biden will be the next president.
"What we’ve heard so far from the Democratic Party is what they’re not going to do," defund advocate Andrea Ritchie told Mother Jones. "I don’t expect they will be supportive of the main demand from the streets ... It's gonna be a fight. We're not going away."
Biden embraced some calls for police reform during his presidential campaign, such as a ban on chokeholds and the creation of a national police oversight commission. But he opposed far-left efforts to defund the police, a catch-all term for anything from reducing police budgets to abolishing law enforcement completely. Biden instead pushed for $300 million in additional police funding, mainly for improved training.
"I’m very pessimistic about what we can expect, at least initially, from the Biden administration,” said Alex Vitale, a professor and author of a book about police abolition. “He’s made it very clear that he wants to put more resources into policing, that he supports the kind of superficial and ineffective procedural reforms that the Obama administration proposed.”
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