Former President Donald Trump accepted a national police union’s endorsement in North Carolina Friday by warning that law enforcement officers are in “more danger” than ever as a result of policies backed by Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) announced earlier in the day that it was choosing Trump as its favored candidate in the 2024 contest, support the 78-year-old said he was “deeply honored” to accept as he stood alongside union president Patrick Yoes at a gathering in Charlotte.
“We know all about you and the great job that you do and the people of this country respect you greatly for it,” Trump said. “So I just want to thank you on behalf of everybody because I see it.”
“Unfortunately, we were talking a little while ago,” he added, “it’s probably also a profession that’s under more danger and threat than ever before, which we hate to see.”
As of July 31, the FOP reported, 223 officers have been shot in the line of duty, a slight dip of 2% from the same point in 2023, and 31 officers have been killed by gunfire.
A record-high 378 men and women in blue were shot in 2023, and 46 were killed.
“I visit a lot of families of police officers who are no longer with us, and we have to get back the power and respect that they deserve more than anybody,” Trump recounted. “And we’re gonna do that.”
The former president also claimed to have been endorsed by “New York’s finest,” despite no public announcement to that effect by any NYPD union.
“They’re not supposed to. They said we don’t care — we’re endorsing you anyway,” he bragged.
Trump contrasted his plans to “launch a war on crime in America” — including promises to protect qualified immunity to protect officers from lawsuits, a pledge to back the death penalty for cop killers and a wide-scale crackdown on drug gangs and their leaders — with what he called “Kamala’s crime wave.”
“As we gather today, American cities, suburbs and towns are totally under siege,” Trump told FOP members. “Kamala Harris and the communist left have unleashed a brutal plague of bloodshed, crime, chaos, misery and death upon our land.”
“Other than that,” he joked, “they’re doing actually quite well.”
Trump went on to recount cases of cops being shot on the job just the night before in Milwaukee, before describing the “filth,” “graffiti” and rampant retail theft that the “law-abiding citizen is forced to live” with.
“The new thing in New York, you go to a pharmacy to buy aspirin, to buy a toothbrush and it takes you 45 minutes to get a clerk to open up the glass because people are walking in and just taking it as much as they want,” he recounted, before pivoting to attack Harris for her record as a San Francisco district attorney who lightened penalties for thieves.
“She destroyed San Francisco,” he said, referring to Harris in front of the officers as “our opponent.”
“But she came up with a great idea. You can steal as much as you want up to $950 and nothing happens to you after that,” he went on.
“So guys are walking in with calculators,” Trump joked again.
In a swipe at House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), he also pointed out the “big wall wrapped around her house … didn’t help with the problems that she had,” apparently referencing her husband Paul Pelosi being bludgeoned by a madman at their San Francisco residence in fall 2022.
On a press call earlier Friday, Michigan Police Officers Association President James Tignanelli noted that his state’s attorney general, a Democrat who has endorsed Harris, had indicted “between 10 and 15 police officers” while in office.
“That doesn’t help attract your candidates,” Tignanelli told reporters.
Dr. John Lott, the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, also shared startling statistics about the rise in unreported violent crimes during President Biden and Harris’ tenure.
“If you look at total violent crime during the Trump administration, it fell by 17% and it’s increased by 43% under the Biden administration,” Lott said, citing data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
“There’s no time in our history where we’ve had recorded data for total violent crime that we’ve seen such a large increase,” he added, pointing to the last report on criminal victimization released by the DOJ bureau in 2022.
Before 2020, Lott explained, both the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI “generally moved along together” in the numbers that were reported, but have since “moved in opposite directions each year, often by very large amounts.”
“While the FBI showed a 2% drop in reported violent crime, the national crime victimization data showed a 42% increase in violent crime,” he said citing 2022 figures.
Trump was nevertheless in a celebratory mood Friday after Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan pushed the sentencing date for his “hush money” conviction until Nov. 26, meaning he won’t face potential imprisonment before Election Day.
The case “has been postponed because everyone realizes that there was no case because I did nothing wrong,” he crowed. “It’s an attack by my political opponents in Washington, DC and Comrade Kamala Harris and radical left opponents for purposes of election interference.”
“We will restore public safety to our streets. We will bring back law and order to our nation,” he vowed to the FOP attendees. “You’re gonna have the backup like you never had it before when you had it four years ago.”
