Second 2020 Presidential Debate: on Crime

Donald Trump: Strong on law enforcement AND on enforcing law on police

TRUMP: We have a Senator named Tim Scott from South Carolina. He came up with a bill that should have been approved. It was great. It was a bill that was strong in terms of law enforcement, and strong in terms of enforcing the proper thing, and doing the proper thing by law enforcement. And the Democrats just wouldn't go for it. They wouldn't go for it at all. And I don't know why, because it was a really great bill.

BIDEN: One of the things that has to change is so many cops get called into circumstances where somebody is mentally off. That's why we have to provide within police departments psychologists and social workers to go out with the cops on those calls, some of those 911 calls to de-escalate the circumstance, to deal with talking them down. We shouldn't be defunding cops. We should be mandating the things that we should be doing within police departments and make sure there's total transparency.

Joe Biden: More community policing, but not as police jump-out squads

BIDEN: Yes, if in fact they're involved in community policing, not jump-out squads [raids by police vehicles]. For example, when we had community policing, from the mid-'90s on until till Bush got elected, what happened? Violent crime actually went down precipitously. The cops didn't like the community policing, because you had to have two people in the vehicle, they had to get out of their cars, they had to introduce themselves to who own the local liquor store, who owned the local grocery store, who was the woman on the corner. And what they would do, they'd actually go and give people their phone numbers. A cop would give the phone number.

TRUMP: [I support the bill introduced by Senator] Tim Scott: that was strong in terms of law enforcement, and strong in terms of doing the proper thing by law enforcement. And the Democrats just wouldn't go for it.

Joe Biden: The same time for the same crime, for blacks and whites

BIDEN: Right.

Q:Was it a mistake to support it?

BIDEN: What we did federally was all about the same time for the same crime. We did a study: what happens if you're a Black man and it's the first time you've committed robbery, how long would you go to jail? If you're White man, how long? The Black man would go to jail on average 13 years. White man, two years. We set up a sentencing commission. We didn't set the time. What happened was it became the same time for the same crime.

Q: How do you prevent the kind of policing that results in police-on-civilian tragedies?

BIDEN: One of the things that has to change is so many cops get called into circumstances where somebody is mentally off. That's why we have to provide within police departments psychologists and social workers to go out with the cops on those calls, some of those 911 calls to de-escalate the circumstance, to deal with talking them down.