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The National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO) called on Vice President Kamala Harris to apologize over her remarks concerning law enforcement officials.
The NAPO’s Tuesday letter was featured in a press release by the Trump campaign on Wednesday.
“Kamala Harris has shown once again that she simply has no actual knowledge of what modern American police officers do, and worse, doesn’t seem to even care for the men and women who put their life on the line to protect American communities. We call on her to retract and apologize for her comments equating policing to lynching and slavery,” Michael McHale, the president of the NAPO, said.
“She has yet to explain her support for defunding the police and even worse, her support for the so-called ‘Minnesota Freedom Fund’ that put persons arrested for violent crimes back on the streets as Minneapolis burned during the George Floyd riots,” he added.
McHale also reminded Harris of the importance of police officers and their work to safeguard America’s communities.
“These newly uncovered comments show that not only does she not back law enforcement, but that she may hate it enough to lie about it. Vice President Harris: For your information, it is America’s law enforcement officers who daily combat deadly human trafficking, child abuse, abductions, illegal sweat shops, and modern slavery,” he stated.
The NAPO president responded to the vice president’s 2020 remarks that compared policing to slavery, lynching and Jim Crow.
“When we say that America has a history of systemic racism, we mean that from slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and policing, our institutions have done violence to black Americans,” Harris, then a senator from California, said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Police Use of Force and Community Relations” in June 2020 following the death of George Floyd by Minneapolis, according to The New York Post on Tuesday.
“And it has caused black Americans to be treated as less than human across time, place, and institution,” Harris added.
McHale’s demand for an apology corrected this false information, standing up for the integrity and importance of law enforcement officials.
“Far from being today’s cruel slavers, the men and women of America’s police agencies are the single biggest force for public safety, freedom, and liberty in our nation,” he concluded.
