Does Donald Trump or Joe Biden have the better approach to Policing?

Biden would invest a further $300M in community policing

Question: Does Donald Trump or Joe Biden have the better approach to Policing?
Position‹2 of 3›: Joe Biden has the better approach to Policing
Argument‹4 of 5›: Biden would invest a further $300M in community policing

Rather than defunding the police, Biden would add more funding for local police efforts to build better relationships with the communities they serve.

The argument

Joe Biden plans to invest $300 million into the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. This program is designed to encourage healthy relationships between police officers and the members of the communities that they police, and this investment will allow police departments to effectively implement COPS. The COPS program already exists, but it has not had the necessary funding in order to be effective. Biden’s plan to invest $300 million into the program will allow police departments to hire enough officers to be able to maintain their normal duties while also sending officers into the streets to interact with their respective communities. The grant will also be directed toward training officers on how to interact with the community in a way that will build healthy relationships between officers and community members. Having a level of trust between the community and the police departments will better equip officers to prevent crime. In order to receive this proposed grant, police departments must ensure that the racial makeup of new officers that are hired will reflect that of the community that they will be policing.

Premises

[P1]Healthy, trusting relationships between police and the communities they serve improve crime prevention and policing outcomes. [P2] The COPS program is designed to foster these relationships but currently lacks adequate funding and training resources. [P3] Biden's plan invests $300 million in COPS to fund community engagement, relationship-building training, and hiring officers whose racial makeup reflects their communities. [C] Therefore, Biden offers the better approach to policing by meaningfully strengthening community-oriented policing.

Counter-arguments

The COPS program has received roughly $14 billion in the 26 years since it began (more than $500 million per year), so putting $300 million more into it will probably not make any difference. Applying racial requirements to the hiring process may slow it down, and while mirroring the racial makeup of communities may make some people more comfortable, it will likely further the divide between races in America rather than minimize it. Additionally, establishing racial requirements for hiring sets a dangerous precedence for excluding individuals from job opportunities based on their race. This program will introduce more police officers into the streets, but the current police officers need to be addressed first. Until there is evidence that police reform can be achieved, there should not be any push for more officers.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The link between community trust and crime outcomes is widely assumed and hard to establish. Evaluations of community-oriented policing find improvements in how the police are perceived far more reliably than reductions in crime. [Rejecting P2] The underfunding claim does not fit the record. The programme has received billions since it began, averaging more per year than the proposed increment, so the premise misdescribes the constraint the money is supposed to remove. [Rejecting P3] The sum is small against total policing expenditure, and its components pull in different directions. Hiring more officers, retraining existing ones, and changing the composition of recruitment are three separate interventions competing for one grant. [Rejecting C] 'Better approach' is comparative and the premises describe a single programme. They also leave unanswered the objection that adding officers before demonstrating that reform works puts the sequence the wrong way round.