On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “At This Hour,” Miami Police Chief and Major Cities Chiefs Association President Art Acevedo lamented that police chiefs in major cities “don’t have a seat at the table,” at President Joe Biden’s crime discussion and urged Biden to address the issue of “judges and prosecutors that are absolutely coddling violent criminals.”
Acevedo said, “The first thing I would say to the president is it is disappointing that as president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, that has the 70 largest police departments in the country, and the nine largest in Canada, that we don’t have a seat at the table, apparently. Because we don’t — we didn’t have an invitation to this conversation. And we’ve been ringing the bell and sounding the alarm for quite a while. This uptick didn’t just start. It started during the last administration and it’s just progressively getting worse. And what we want to hear from the president is a commitment to look at what’s going on with our criminal justice system, with court systems that are shut down, with judges and prosecutors that are absolutely coddling violent criminals. Where bad actors that are caught with firearms, police officers are working and bad actors with a history of convictions of violence are caught with firearms and there are no consequences.”
He later added that getting courts back open and up to speed will help, but said that prosecutors who aren’t going after criminals is an issue.
Acevedo concluded, “We’ve lost our common sense. On the right, it’s about more guns for everybody. And on the left, it’s about let’s try to save everybody including people that just — they’re not interested in playing by the rules.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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