Fact Checker Analysis: Vanita Gupta’s shifting views on defunding police, decriminalizing drugs

By Salvatore Rizzo @ WashingtonPost.com, March 10

“Do you support defunding the police?”

— Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), in a hearing on Vanita Gupta’s nomination to be associate attorney general, March 9

“I do not support defunding the police. I have, in fact, spent my career advocating where it has been necessary for greater resources for law enforcement and things like body-worn cameras, officer wellness and safety programs, and any number of measures.”

— Gupta, at the hearing

During the Trump years, Gupta was a leading advocate for criminal justice reform and more progressive policing.

Now, she is President Biden’s nominee to be associate attorney general, the No. 3 position at the Department of Justice and one of the few federal offices with any say over “defunding the police.”

Some of the measures Gupta recommended to lawmakers just last year, or as an ACLU lawyer earlier in her career, go much further than Biden’s agenda. Lo and behold, they were no longer her positions by the time of her Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

Is this a flip-flop? Is that a flip-flop? Let’s take a look.

The Facts

Police departments are funded at the local level, but the associate attorney general, among other responsibilities, oversees what can be hefty federal grants for local law enforcement.

We should pause a moment and explain what it means to “defund the police.” Only in rare instances are liberal advocates calling for the outright elimination of police departments. Proponents by and large want to redirect some funds now spent on police forces to items such as education, public health, housing and youth services. The idea is that low-income communities would become stronger — and less in need of policing tactics — if root problems were addressed.

Under this concept, some police officers would be replaced with trained social workers or specialized response teams in an effort to let police focus on violent crime, not drug overdoses or homelessness. The theory is that police would be better positioned to deal with rapes and murders if they were not required to deal with other social ills that sometimes lead to community confrontations with police

Gupta said several times at the Senate hearing that she does not support defunding the police. In November 2015, as an Obama Justice Department official, she testified in support of increasing funding for the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program of federal grants to local police departments. She has also called for increases to recruitment, mental health and officer assistance funding.

A Biden-Harris transition spokesman noted that Gupta has been endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police (which is notable because the union endorsed former president Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020) and other major law enforcement unions.

As head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division in the Obama administration beginning in 2014, Gupta oversaw consent decrees with local police departments, which required increased funding resources. She also oversaw sensitive investigations into police departments in Baltimore, Chicago and Ferguson, Mo., after widely covered police shootings of unarmed Black men in those cities. Her office issued tough reports and recommended a series of changes in each case.

“In executing the duties of her office, Ms. Gupta was in regular contact with the FOP on matters of mutual concern or interest,” the FOP national president, Patrick Yoes, wrote in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “She always worked with us to find common ground even when that seemed impossible. Although in some instances our disagreements remain, her open and candid approach has created a working relationship that is grounded in mutual respect and understanding.”

But here’s the issue.

In her current job, as president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Gupta emerged as a high-profile critic of the Trump administration and recommended a series of police changes during a Senate hearing last year.

Gupta testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July that it was “critical for state and local leaders to heed calls from Black Lives Matter and Movement for Black Lives activists to decrease police budgets and the scope, role and responsibility of police in our lives” and called for “shifting our approach to public safety away from exclusive investments in criminalization and policing toward investments in economic opportunity, education, health care and other public benefits.”

That’s exactly what “defunding the police” is all about. Now Gupta says she has never supported the idea.

“She was speaking on behalf of her organization to reflect the consensus position among civil rights groups — not in her personal capacity — and has never personally supported defunding the police in any sense,” Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden-Harris transition, told us. “Across her time in public life, she has secured increases in funding for law enforcement, including in particularly difficult circumstances. As she underlined in the hearing, and as President Biden ran on, she supports providing more resources to police by boosting funding for the COPS program by $300 million.”

It wasn’t the only position she disavowed. In her Judiciary Committee testimony from July, Gupta called for an end to qualified immunity. That’s the legal principle that shields government officials, including police officers accused of using excessive force in some cases, from having to face lawsuits for their conduct on the job [....]

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding's reply to a related tweet by Senator Cornyn:

Preet Bharara: