With crime a key issue for voters, Harris and Trump both tout law enforcement support
On a stage festooned with American flags and Fraternal Order of Police banners in North Carolina on Friday, former President Trump accepted the backing of the country’s largest police union.
National Fraternal Order of Police President Patrick Yoes said the “enthusiastic endorsement” reflected the “overwhelming collective will” of the group’s more than 375,000 members nationally.
“We stand with you, and we have your back,” Yoes said, promising the group’s members would “make the case” for Trump to voters across the nation over the next two months.
“This is a big endorsement for me,” Trump said. “Boy, that’s a lot of protection.”
Prior to Trump’s event, the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris held a call with her own law enforcement supporters. First to speak was former U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, who was at the Capitol when a mob of Trump supporters attacked the building on Jan. 6, 2021.
Dunn said Trump’s promised support for law enforcement was nothing but a play for votes — and a lie.
“He’s going to tell my fellow officers that he’s their ally, he’s their friend, and he’s [the] candidate of law and order,” Dunn said. “After what I experienced on Jan. 6, I can assure you that he is not.”
Dunn said he knows many officers who are “appalled by the FOP even entertaining endorsing” Trump, given his felony convictions, his actions on Jan. 6 and his recent promise to pardon the insurrectionists who attacked police officers that day.
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“He abandoned us,” Dunn said. “Law and order and the democracy I vowed to protect — he abandoned that.”
With two months until the election, both the Trump and Harris campaigns are trotting out their law enforcement backers as a means of attracting voters in a race in which crime — along with the economy and immigration — is a major issue.
Despite downward trends in many crime categories nationally, voters are nonetheless weary of retail crime, drug offenses and violence, and looking for solutions. A recent UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, co-sponsored by The Times, found that a majority of voters in liberal California support stiffer penalties for crimes involving theft and fentanyl.
Both Trump and Harris have said they take such issues seriously and would bring solutions as president, while their opponent would only exacerbate the problems.
Trump has cast Harris, a former prosecutor and California attorney general, as soft on crime and anti-police, including by pointing to persistent crime issues in cities like San Francisco, where she once served as district attorney. Trump has advocated for more aggressive policing, and for less federal oversight and more military equipment for local police departments.
Harris has cast Trump, a felon, as a fraud who solicits law enforcement support when it is convenient for votes, but is otherwise hostile toward law enforcement — especially when he is being investigated. She has advocated for responsive but constitutional policing and for stronger federal oversight and less military equipment for local police departments, and has touted the Biden administration’s record funding for law enforcement through COVID-19 relief funds.
Trump’s event Friday was not his first with law enforcement, but it was a major one, as the police union has members all across the country — including some 17,000 members in California. The group does not represent the biggest law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles. A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union that represents rank-and-file LAPD officers, said it is not weighing in on the national race and is instead focused on ousting progressive L.A. County Dist. Atty. George Gascón.
After being introduced by Yoes, Trump spoke for nearly an hour. He said law enforcement officers face “more danger and threat than ever before,” and that “we have to give back the power and respect that they deserve.”
He said crime was the No. 1 issue that people ask him about, and that he would bring back controversial “stop and frisk” and “broken windows” policing to bring it to an end.
He also repeated many of his stump speech lies and grievances — some aimed at Harris, many to applause from the gathered law enforcement officers. He claimed violent and other crime is “through the roof,” when data show the opposite is true in many parts of the country.
He falsely alleged Harris made it so that “you can steal as much as you want up to $950” in San Francisco and “nothing happens to you, no matter what the hell you do.” He mocked the 2022 attack on Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, at their home in San Francisco, to laughter in the crowd.
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The event followed a Trump campaign call where campaign officials and law enforcement officials in swing states praised Trump’s record, blamed Harris for crime problems in California and accused her of being “pro-crime” and “coddling criminals.”
The Harris campaign last week also touted law enforcement support, including by releasing an endorsement letter from more than 100 former and current law enforcement officers and leaders. The letter cited a rise in homicides during Trump’s presidency and a sharp decline during the Biden administration. It described Harris as someone who has “spent her career enforcing our laws,” and Trump as someone “who has been convicted of breaking them.”
On the call with Dunn, Sheriff Clarence Birkhead of Durham County, N.C., said there that Trump tries “to portray himself as a friend of law enforcement, but we know it’s not true.”
He said Trump would use federal law enforcement to go after his political enemies instead of investing resources in local law enforcement, and use plans set out in the conservative Project 2025 to withhold even more — “making it nearly impossible for us to keep our communities safe from violence.”
He said Harris, by contrast, “has spent her entire career fighting for people and standing with local law enforcement like me,” which is why officers like those who signed the letter are “lining up” to support her.
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Sheriff Javier Salazar, of Bexar County, Texas, said he was confused by the Fraternal Order of Police endorsement of Trump, whom he called “a person that wouldn’t qualify to be a law enforcement officer,” given his felonies.
Salazar said Trump “uses cops as nothing more than a photo op, or a television prop,” and that he “purports to support law enforcement until we get in his way — until we stand in the way of him doing exactly what he wants to do. He proved it on Jan. 6.”
Dunn said Trump’s only allegiance is to himself. “The truth is that he doesn’t care that he put my life and the lives of my fellow Capitol Police officers in danger on Jan. 6,” he said.
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