Biden Questions Why Police ‘Always Shoot with Deadly Force’
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President Biden suggested on Monday that the U.S. must “retrain cops” so that they don’t “always shoot with deadly force.”
Biden’s comments came as he discussed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act during the National Action Network Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Breakfast. He called out Senate Republicans for blocking the bill last year but celebrated an executive order he later issued on police reforms.
“I did the only thing I could do: I signed a historic executive order that included key elements of that bill at the federal level,” he said, adding the order “bans chokeholds and greatly restricts no-knock warrants, it creates a national database for officer misconduct and tightens the use-of-force policies to emphasize deescalation.”
“We have to retrain cops,” Biden said. “Why should you always shoot with deadly force? The fact is if you need to use your weapon, you don’t have to do that,” Biden said.
Biden offered similar advice to police officers during a 2020 campaign town hall.
“Instead of anybody coming at you and the first thing you do is shoot to kill, you shoot them in the leg,” Biden said.
Police training holds that, once an officer has made the decision to use deadly force, he should aim for his opponent’s center of mass and continue firing until the threat is neutralized.
Police have fatally shot 1,101 people in the last 12 months, according to a Washington Post database. Of cases in the database that include information on whether the person was armed, 83 percent of people who were fatally shot by police since 2015 were armed. Just 6 percent of cases were unarmed.
Biden also noted he signed the “first major gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years” after the mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas, last year.
“I am going to get assault weapons banned,” Biden said. “I did it once, I’m going to do it again. There’s no social redeeming value. You aren’t wearing kevlar vests out there.”
He added that he will “ban the number of bullets that can go in a magazine.”
He added: “I love my right wing friends who talk about the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots. If you need to worry about taking on the federal government you need some f-15s. You don’t need an AR-15”
Biden also discussed the country’s deficit and called Republicans “fiscally demented.”
