Biden tries to find middle ground on crime and policing, but both progressives and conservatives demand more

President Biden arrived in New York CIty on Thursday afternoon to meet with the city’s new mayor, Eric Adams, and to show support for a city still grieving from the death of two officers, slain last month in the line of duty as they investigated a complaint in Harlem.

New York’s loss was also “a loss for the nation,” Biden said of Officers Wilbert Mora and Jason Rivera, as he commenced a meeting on gun violence at the lower Manhattan headquarters of the New York Police Department. In attendance were Adams, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and other elected officials.

Trying to strike a middle ground amid rising violent crime rates and increased scrutiny of police misconduct, Biden espoused support for both law enforcement generally — and for the kind of “community policing” some reformers say is a necessary corrective from the militarized, aggressive mindset that has alienated communities of color.

“I don’t hear many communities, no matter their color or their background, saying, ‘I don't want more protection in my community,’” Biden said, noting that he was a principal architect of the now controversial 1994 crime bill, which in many ways engendered the kind of policing now falling out of favor. “I don’t know, I haven’t found one of those yet.”

Earlier on Thursday, the Biden administration unveiled new measures it said would help reduce gun violence. The plan is focused on stopping the trafficking of illegal guns. The president is also calling for $500 million in new funding for community policing and violence interruption strategies. And the Department of Justice will direct U.S. attorneys to coordinate efforts with local law enforcement departments.

In some ways, the plan is a restatement of the violent crime initiative the Biden administration released last summer.

The administration is also working on an executive order to address police reform, but that effort has been challenged by police groups that dislike rhetoric about “systemic racism” in their profession, according to a New York Times report on the order. “We’re not close on that front, but we are working on it,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said aboard Air Force One on the way to New York in reference to those developments.

Legislation meant to enact police reform, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, failed to advance, despite a nominally bipartisan effort.

Buffeted by competing imperatives, Biden could end up satisfying neither progressives demanding systemic change nor moderates in favor of some criminal justice reform but also concerned about the drumbeat of news reports about crime.

“The White House just needs to make sure the violent crime conversation does not over take the police reform conversation because they are two different things,” a former Biden administration official told Politico. “I believe they are sensitive to that dynamic.”

That dynamic has left Biden looking for solutions to a challenge that seems at once intractable and urgent.

With progressives calling for police reform and conservatives calling for a more unambiguous law-and-order message, Biden has little political room to maneuver.

Evidence of that reality was in evidence as the president arrived in New York. The progressive March for Our Lives group released a statement criticizing both Biden and Adams for signaling what it views as a shift away from criminal justice reform of the kind that Biden and many other Democrats vociferously supported during the racial justice protests of 2020.

“We can't criminalize our way out of gun violence, and we worry that their approaches return us to a dark era of policing and mass incarceration as a tool to stop violent crime,” the March for Our Lives statement said.

Progressives in Congress like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have voiced similar complaints. But those critiques are not being embraced by the White House, which continues to use the language of the social justice movement even as its policies plainly suggest a more moderate approach. Biden appears to be making the same calculation that Adams did during his victory in last November’s mayoral race: that rank-and-file Democrats, including many people of color, are more moderate on public safety issues than some of their more outspoken representatives.

Biden’s opponents, meanwhile, have continued to insist that he supports defunding police, despite repeated avowals to the contrary. Stephen Miller, a leading Trump administration adviser, blasted Biden as presiding over “raging crime,” though the spike in violent crime in fact began under Trump.

Statistics released by the Council on Criminal Justice late last month saw that homicides increased by 5 percent from 2020 to 2021 — and by 44 percent from 2019. The killings most frequently involve guns, with young men of color disproportionately the victims.

At the same time, viral videos of smash-and-grab robberies in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles have led to a public outcry, even though some criminal justice reformers say those videos exaggerate the extent of such criminal activity and needlessly reinforce harmful stereotypes.

Together, these forces have fostered a deepening sense of rising crime, even though American cities are much safer than they were in the 1980s. A former police officer himself, Adams has spoken bluntly about the need to confront criminal activity, dismissing the concerns of progressive activists who fear he will allow the NYPD to return to the kind of aggressive policing that Rudy Giuliani used as mayor in the 1990s.

“We will not surrender our city to the violent feud. We won’t go back to the bad old days,” the new mayor said last month in unveiling his plan to fight gun violence, which included both more policing and greater community engagement.

His new police commissioner, Keechant Sewell — the first African American woman to lead the nation’s largest police force — was even more blunt in a moving eulogy for Officer Rivera. “NYPD will never give up this city,” she said to applause. “We will always prevail.”

Biden noted that Officers Mora and Rivera were killed by a stolen gun, which he described as a “weapon of war.” His administration has sought to interdict trafficked guns and “ghost guns,” which are thought to account for most gun crimes.

As for policing, Biden needs Congress to approve his 2022 budget in order for millions to flow into efforts to reimagine policing — efforts that Americans support much more than they do defunding the police or leaving police free of scrutiny. “It’s time to fund community policing to protect and serve the community.” Biden said.