With each passing second, Tim Kaine and Mike Pence’s debate has become more incendiary. The two men have clashed on Donald Trump’s words, a revisionist history regarding the Iraq war, and most intensely on police reform. In the first presidential debate, Donald Trump went back and forth with moderator Lester Holt with Trump claiming that stop-and-frisk was constitutional (it isn’t).
“…It went before a judge who was a very against-police judge, it was taken away from her, and our mayor, our new mayor, refused to go forward with the case.”
“The argument is that it’s a form of racial profiling,” Holt replied.
“No, the argument is that we have to take the guns away from these people that have them and that are bad people that shouldn’t have them,” Trump said, changing the subject. “These are felons. These are people that are bad people.”
The subject came up once again regarding whether police are handling too much, and having to work around the fact that mental health funding and lack of support at schools has affected communities and made them more difficult to work within. Kaine agrees that the police are possibly working too hard and the answer isn’t a more militarized approach. We shouldn’t polarize the police or communities with unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policies.
“Here’s what I learned as a mayor and a governor. The way you make communities safer, and the way you make police safer, is through community policing. You build the bonds between the community and the police force, bonds of understanding, and then when people feel comfortable in their communities that gap between the police and their communities narrows and when that gap narrows it’s safer for the communities and it’s safer for the police. That model still works across our country, but there are models that don’t work. An overly-aggressive more militarized model. Donald Trump recently said we need to do more stop-and-frisk around the country. That would be a big mistake because it polarizes the relationship with the police and the community.”
This was Pence’s reaction:
