As protesters around the country demand large-scale criminal justice reform in response to the high-profile deaths of black people killed by law enforcement in recent years, Joe Biden’s public embrace of their platform has aggravated some of the most vocal and politically powerful organized labor organizations in the country: police unions.
Loyal supporters since Biden shepherded landmark crime legislation through Congress in the 1990s, police unions and their rank-and-file members are feeling increasingly alienated by the former vice president as the political winds have shifted—and as calls for permanent criminal justice reform have become Democratic orthodoxy.
“It just shows that he is a typical politician and just goes with whichever way the wind blows,” said Paul DiGiacomo, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, the second-largest labor union representing New York City Police Department officers. DiGiacomo told The Daily Beast that Biden—whom he once considered a reliable ally of police unions—has changed his stance on law enforcement issues to his political peril.
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“It’s not popular to support the police now,” DiGiacomo said, “and he’s just using opportunities that are going on throughout this country to condemn all police, which is unfair.”
In recent weeks, Biden has foregrounded the concerns of black Americans—to whom he owes much of his victory in the Democratic presidential primaries—in public and private remarks about the protests and riots that have engulfed cities across the country.
“‘I can’t breathe—I can’t breathe,’” Biden said on Tuesday morning in Philadelphia, opening his first non-virtual event in nearly three months by quoting the dying words of George Floyd, a black Minneapolis man who was killed last week as a police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Floyd’s plea for breath, Biden said, “speak to a nation where too often just the color of your skin puts your life at risk.”
“It’s a wake-up call for our nation—for all of us,” Biden continued. “It’s not the first time we’ve heard these words—they’re the same words we heard from Eric Garner when his life was taken six years ago. But it’s time to listen to these words, understand them, and respond to them with real action.”
In that address, Biden responded to the nationwide protests, now in their second week, with calls for Congress to enact “long-overdue concrete changes” to law enforcement, including a ban on chokeholds by law enforcement officers, to end the transfer of military weapons to police forces, craft a “model” use-of-force standard for engagement with suspects and protesters, and pledged to create a national police review board within the first 100 days of his administration.
“It’s time to pass legislation that will give true meaning to our constitutional promise of equal protection under the law,” Biden said.
Those remarks won Biden endorsements from progressives like former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro—but for police unions, who Biden once considered instrumental in crafting legislation related to criminal justice, the former vice president’s new rhetoric has given them whiplash.
“I was with him at numerous conferences and events, when we were his best friend,” DiGiacomo said. “They had a goal, and they sat down with police and got information from different cities throughout the United States on what we need, and how we could best protect the people of the United States, and he had input from the police and the police unions, on what was needed at the time. He didn’t do that this time, though.”
“I’d be the first one to tell you should there be some police reform,” said Tom Scotto, who was president of the DEA in the 1990s and has also served as president of the National Association of Police Organizations, a coalition that lobbies on behalf of law enforcement. As head of the DEA, Scotto worked closely with Biden and his office on the crime bill and considers the former vice president a personal friend. “But the federal government can’t impose guidelines on everybody… we’re gonna need another crime bill in the next five to ten years if this continues.”
DiGiacomo was referring to the creation of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the largest crime bill in American history, which provided nearly $10 billion in federal funding for prisons and added 100,000 police officers to forces across the country. Passed when national crime rates were at a record high, and after Democrats had been repeatedly drubbed by Republicans who accused them of being “soft on crime,” the bill was authored by Biden. For decades, Biden referred to the legislation as the “Biden crime bill.”
As the bill was being debated in the Senate in late summer of 1994, Biden boasted that he had crafted the legislation under the advice of nearly every major law enforcement organization and labor union in the country.
“I did not call a liberal confab and write it; I did not call Johnsonian liberals, if there are any still alive, and write it; I did not call any big society people and write it. I called the cops,” Biden said in his floor speech at the time. “I called them all and they came in and sat in my office and I said, ‘What do you need?’ They said, ‘The first thing we need is we need more cops.’ And they said, ‘The second thing we need is we need more prisons.’”
The bill, passed by a Democrat-held House and Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, had until recently been considered one of Biden’s landmark accomplishments in the Senate. Even former President Barack Obama once lauded it as “starting an eight-year drop in crime across the country” when he announced Biden as his running mate in 2008. But as the scale of unchecked police violence against black and minority people has come into focus in recent years, Biden has distanced himself from some of the bill’s more controversial inclusions, including sentencing disparities for possession of crack cocaine and a habitual offender provision that is seen as having contributed to mass incarceration of black men.
“Violent crime had spiked to record levels and there was a broad consensus that it had to be addressed, which was a driving motivation behind the 1994 crime bill,” a Biden adviser told The Daily Beast, describing the legislation as the product of a different time with different national concerns. The bill, however, “was not a monolith,” the adviser added, noting that the act also included funding for prevention programs, community policing, and gave the Justice Department to launch “pattern or practice” investigations into local police departments to uncover racial bias within police forces.
“The Obama-Biden Department of Justice used this authority numerous times,” the adviser said, “most famously with the comprehensive report on the Ferguson Police Department. Many of those changes provided the foundations for the progressive reforms Joe Biden would fight for in the White House every single day.”
This pullback, union leaders told The Daily Beast, may reassure liberals living in an America with the lowest crime rates since the mid-1960s, but it could outrage police unions—particularly in light of Biden’s longtime support for organized labor more broadly.
“It’s always better to educate people that are trying to make reform when they don’t know what we do, have never walked in our shoes, never had been in a violent riot, and have never policed in the city of New York,” DiGiacomo said. “To criticize, and to make reform without knowing why you’re making the reform, is quite disturbing.”
Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association and a public Trump supporter, has made little secret of his preference for the president’s support of “law and order” policing and disdain for civilian oversight of police forces. In February, the union announced that the president “has our backs!”, although it has not officially endorsed the president yet.
The Biden adviser told The Daily Beast that the former vice president’s call for reform “does not at all mean that we don’t honor the men and women who put their lives on the line to protect us every single day.”
“What every American needs and deserves is for the fundamental rights and dignity of all people to be upheld, and for all communities without exception to have healthy and trusting relationships to the law enforcement officers we all depend on,” the adviser said. “That includes recognition for the invaluable sacrifice and service of our first responders.”
Numerous law enforcement unions broke for Trump in 2016, and others endorsed his reelection even before the Democratic primary had begun.
“Every top Democrat currently running for this office has vilified the police and made criminals out to be victims,” said Sam Cabral, president of the International Union of Police Associations, in an endorsement last September that lauded Trump for doing more on behalf of law enforcement in two years than Obama had done in eight. “They seem to take any union’s support for granted… While his candor ruffles the feathers of the left, I find it honest and refreshing. He stands with America’s law enforcement officer and we will continue to stand with him.”
The Trump campaign has sought to exploit both that union enthusiasm and liberal concern about the 1994 crime bill, particularly as protests and riots have spread in response following Floyd’s death. In an email to supporters on Tuesday afternoon, the Trump campaign called Biden “a serial race-baiter” and “the chief architect of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs”—comments that are difficult to square with Trump’s recent demands that governors “dominate” protesters and send them to prison for a decade to quell the unrest.
“Joe Biden’s campaign made it clear that they stand with the rioters, the people burning businesses in minority communities and causing mayhem, by donating to post bail for those arrested,” Katrina Pierson, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement that accused Biden of simultaneously being both too cozy with protesters and too supportive of police crackdowns. “Joe Biden has used the politics of racial division when they suited his needs and he is doing it again.”
On Wednesday, the Trump campaign doubled down on that two-pronged criticism, calling Biden “a typical Washington career politician who spent decades building up America’s mass incarceration system and poisoning the public discourse with race-baiting, divisive, and inflammatory remarks. Now he is posing as the candidate who can undo the damage his own policies and rhetoric created. That’s a joke.”
But the goodwill Biden has built up with unions still has some potency with law enforcement. Part of his appeal during the Democratic primaries was his longstanding support among white working-class voters, many of whom decamped to Trump in the last election. Biden won the endorsement of the International Association of Fire Fighters last April—a labor group whose rank-and-file membership, like law enforcement unions, is whiter and more conservative than many unions—only five days into his campaign.
That kind of support could mitigate his moderation on issues relating to law enforcement funding and incarceration.
“I’ve got to give him credit for what he did already for us,” said Scotto, who described Biden as a senator who could always be counted on to hear out law enforcement unions. “Times are changing, and he sees it from a different viewpoint than I may see it, but I’m sure his desire is to make a fair and equal America for everyone.”
“I mean, ‘typical politician’ from a police union, in this climate, is high praise,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former officer in the New York Police Department. O’Donnell told The Daily Beast that Biden’s longtime support for organized labor—and Trump’s continued mishandling of the most widespread civil unrest in more than half a century—could help shield the former vice president from the harshest critiques.
“Police will know that Donald Trump has made their job gigantically more difficult, OK?” O’Donnell said. “The president of the United States is threatening to send the Army in against teenagers.”
But that tenuous support—police officers are twice as likely to donate to Trump’s campaign as Biden’s, according to a review of FEC data—has its limits, O’Donnell noted.
“According to the lunatic left that doesn’t live in those communities, the police are worse than ISIS—there’s no organization in America that’s worse than the police,” O’Donnell claimed. “That is not an actual belief in the minds of most people, and in the minds of most African Americans, that is not where their heads are at.”
To the Biden campaign, the crisis presented by the nationwide protests and the police violence that sparked them is the most pressing matter.
“One of the most urgent crises at hand for the next president to solve and help the nation heal from is the senseless and continuous killing of Americans of color by law enforcement officers,” the Biden adviser said. “That is in no way mutually exclusive with respecting and honoring law enforcement and its indispensable role in our nation. Rather, it means showing leadership and taking the strong steps that everyone involved needs. And change cannot wait.”
