A police organization backing former President Donald Trump called on Vice President Kamala Harris to apologize for remarks she made in 2020 linking slavery and Jim Crow to policing.
"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,” Michael McHale, president of the National Association of Police Organizations, said in a statement.
“We call on her to retract and apologize for her comments equating policing to lynching and slavery. 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.”
Harris during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on police use of force and community policing said: “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.”
She later posted her remarks online but changed policing to "the criminal justice system."