JOE BIDEN/POLICE/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: [Robin Roberts: “President Trump says that you want to defund the police. Do you?”]
“No I don’t. By the way, he proposes cutting a half a billion dollars of local police support. Look, what the police need is the police, first of all, there has to be national standards that in fact apply to every police department in the country…
I don’t want to defund police departments. I think they need more help, they need more assistance, but that, that– look, there are unethical senators, there are unethical presidents, there are unethical doctors, unethical lawyers, unethical prosecutors, there are unethical cops. They should be rooted out. The vast majority of the police, they’re ashamed of what they saw, what they saw.
But you have to take action, and it has to be national. We have to make it clear that this is about protecting neighborhoods, protecting people, everybody across the board. So the only guy that actually put in a bill to actually defund the police is Donald Trump.”
-Joe Biden, “TRANSCRIPT: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris’ first joint interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts,” abcnews.com, Aug. 23, 2020