Biden: Officers should train to shoot attackers ‘in the leg instead of the heart’
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden suggested that police be trained to shoot individuals posing a threat to them “in the leg instead of the heart,” as the country grapples with its national outrage over the murder of George Floyd.
Biden brought up the idea while speaking to African American community leaders Monday at Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Delaware.
The former vice president mostly sat and listened during the event, only speaking at the end to address the comments and concerns they raised.
“Instead of standing there and teaching a cop when there’s an unarmed person coming at them with a knife or something, shoot them in the leg instead of in the heart,” Biden said, going on to argue that “There’s a lot of different things that can change” in police training.
The former VP also made a pledge to those in attendance to “deal with institutional racism,” as well as to set up a police oversight body within the first 100 days of his presidency.
The 2020 hopeful continued by saying that during the Obama-Biden administration, “We set up, in the Justice Department, the ability for the Civil Rights Division to go in and look at the practices and policies of police departments. That’s why we were able to stop stop-and-frisk.”
Biden said he would “re-establish that with more teeth in it, because we also have to fundamentally change the way in which police are trained.”
Protests and riots erupted across the nation over the weekend in a show of outrage over the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by white police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis last week.
Biden has been dogged throughout his 2020 campaign for his support of the 1994 crime bill, the tough-on-crime legislation that has been blamed for widespread targeting and imprisonment of racial minorities.