2020 presidential candidates on policing

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Presidential election Donald Trump Joe Biden Howie Hawkins Jo Jorgensen

This page includes statements from the 2020 presidential candidates on policing. These statements were compiled from each candidate's official campaign website, editorials, speeches, and interviews.

The candidates featured on this page are the 2020 presidential nominees from the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, and Green parties.

Donald Trump
Joe Biden
Howie Hawkins
Jo Jorgensen

Policing

Republican candidates

Donald Trump

Donald Trump said at a press conference, "I strongly oppose the radical and dangerous efforts to defund, dismantle, and dissolve our police departments, especially now when we’ve achieved the lowest recorded crime rates in recent history." His campaign website says that he signed an executive that "bans chokeholds except in situations where the use of deadly force is allowed by law, creates a national database of police misconduct, and provides supplemental funding for police departments which meet prescribed criteria." ^{[source, as of 2020-06-22]}

Democratic candidates

Joe Biden

Joe Biden wrote in an op-ed, "While I do not believe federal dollars should go to police departments violating people’s rights or turning to violence as the first resort, I do not support defunding police. The better answer is to give police departments the resources they need to implement meaningful reforms, and to condition other federal dollars on completing those reforms."

Biden continued, "I’ve long been a firm believer in the power of community policing — getting cops out of their cruisers and building relationships with the people and the communities they are there to serve and protect. That’s why I’m proposing an additional $300 million to reinvigorate community policing in our country. Every single police department should have the money it needs to institute real reforms like adopting a national use of force standard, buying body cameras and recruiting more diverse police officers." ^{[source, as of 2020-06-10]}

Green candidates

Howie Hawkins

Howie Hawkins' campaign website says, "People can now see that the policing system we have now undermines public safety, particularly for Black people. We must fundamentally rethink how we make communities safe. In order to stop the long-recurring cycle of police brutality toward Black people instigating community uprisings, we must create alternatives to policing for many problems. We must restructure the power relationship between communities and their police. We must examine questions like whether a trained counselor or a conflict resolution specialist would be more effective than a police officer in many situations, whether a mental health worker would be more effective at handling a mental health crisis. And, we must ask if our economy provided for the material needs of people for employment, income, food, housing, healthcare, and education, could we radically reduce the scope and scale of problems police need to respond to." ^{[source, as of 2020-06-18]}

Libertarian candidates

Jo Jorgensen

Jo Jorgensen's campaign website says, "In today’s America, nothing has done more to shine a light on inappropriate police behavior than smartphones.” Jorgensen says it should be up to people in affected communities to decide if police officers wear body cameras. ^{[source, as of 2020-05-30]}

Other policy pages

Footnotes

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