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U.S. President Joe Biden, center, speaks during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, the United States, Monday July 12, 2021.
Sarah Silbiger | UPI | Bloomberg | Getty Images
President Joe Biden met with U.S. police chiefs and elected officials at the White House on Monday to discuss his plan to deal with a continuing increase in gun violence nationwide.
“We recognize that we must come together for the first responsibility of democracy: to protect each other,” Biden said ahead of the meeting. “And that’s what the American people are looking for when it comes to reducing violent crime and gun violence.”
Biden was joined in the White House by US Attorney General Merrick Garland, Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Eric Adams, leader of community intervention as well as several mayors and police chiefs from large and mid-sized US cities to discuss its gun crime prevention strategy, which was unveiled last month.
The meeting comes amid an outbreak of gun violence in several of the nation’s largest cities, a growing political issue for Democrats and the central theme of the Republicans’ effort to take over the House and Senate next year.
The Biden administration faces a big hurdle in trying to balance the fight against gun violence with the continued push for police reform in the United States after the murder of George Floyd last year, all the more so that the president tried to move away from Democrats’ “spending the police” messaging.
During the meeting, Biden urged communities to use the $ 350 billion US bailout, a $ 1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan adopted by Congress in March, to improve public safety. . This includes strengthening law enforcement and expanding community services that prevent crime.
A note sent by the administration on Monday provided examples of how cities are using the funds.
New York City, for example, has proposed to use more than $ 44 million to expand community violence intervention models and redeploy 200 additional police tenders to perform administrative functions in the field.
Other cities listed in the memo include Washington, which proposed using $ 59 million to add spaces for police cadets, community services, and financial assistance that would help citizens involved in gun violence to reintegrate into the community.
“US rescue dollars that go directly to local governments like ours allow us not only to have the agents we need, but to have the community violence interrupters we need to fund pilot programs that will help them. returning citizens… and all of this supports the ecosystem to make cities safer, ”Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said in an interview with MSNBC.
But the US bailout is only part of Biden’s overall strategy to tackle violent crime.
The strategy also strengthens federal gun law enforcement by establishing a new “zero tolerance” policy for gun dealers who violate federal gun sales laws and by delegating new power to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, to revoke reseller licenses. on the first offenses.
Other federal efforts brought about by the strategy include the creation of five new federal strike forces led by the ATF to monitor and intercept gun smuggling along several major arms trafficking corridors between major cities. .
Federal statistics show a significant increase in homicides nationwide, peaking 30% in 2020 from the previous year.
Across the country, mayors and police chiefs have struggled to explain what is behind the increase in mass shootings, homicides and other violent crimes.
Experts point to a perfect storm of factors that collided during the pandemic. They include an increase in private gun sales, widespread unemployment and Covid stay-at-home orders that have left people trapped inside with little to do.
At the same time, protests against the killings of blacks by police may have diverted police resources from traditional police services and eroded public confidence in law enforcement.
However, many of the factors that may have contributed to the increase in violent crime are difficult to quantify.
And given that police in America tend to be very localized, Biden’s options at the federal level are limited.
– CNBC’s Christina Wilkie contributed to this report.
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