President Donald Trump said Monday some police officers “choke” in shooting incidents in the United States, comparing them to golfers in a tournament.
During an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham to incidents like Jacob Blake’s shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a police officer shot him in the back as he tried to enter his vehicle.
“Shooting a guy in the back many times … couldn’t you have done something different? Couldn’t you have wrestled him?” Trump mused. “In the meantime, he might’ve been going for a weapon and there’s a whole big thing there. But they choke. Just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot putt.”
“You’re not comparing it to golf,” Ingraham interrupted. “Because of course, that’s what the media would say.”
“I’m saying people choke,” Trump replied.
He noted police officers faced difficult decisions every day, some of them made quickly.
“You’ve got a quarter of a second to make a decision,” Trump said. “If you don’t make the decision and you’re wrong, you’re dead.”
The president also spoke about police officers in a press conference on Monday evening, noting there were “bad cops” that needed to be removed from the force.
“The bad cops — everybody agrees they have to be very tough on bad cops,” he said. “But sometimes you have a cop or a police person who is a good police person, right? Good. But they choke.”
Trump said it was unfair that one mistake from police officers making a split-second decision was featured in the news for weeks.
“They go through this, and they study this, and they work on it all the time,” Trump said. “They literally have a quarter of a second to make some of these decisions. And they make a wrong decision, and it’s very devastating.”