The Rev. Al Sharpton said calls to “defund the police” that are taking place across the country are “misleading.”
During a Monday appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Sharpton discussed protesters demands that police departments be defunded or even disbanded in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a black man, who was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
“The slogan may be misleading without interpretation,” Sharpton said of the calls to defund the police. “I don’t think that anyone, other than the far extremes, are saying we don’t want any kind of policing at all, any kind of public safety.”
He told host Joe Scarborough that the message is really to reform “policing as we know it.”
On Sunday, nine Minneapolis City Council members agreed to take steps toward ending the police department. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he would cut funding to the police department and reallocate the money to social services.
Sharpton said he expects police departments to be redesigned, not completely eliminated.
“I’ve heard they’re really talking about adjusting and, in many ways, recommitting the funding toward things like community policing, like mental health, intervention that does not involve policing as we know it and putting a lot into police training,” Sharpton said of plans to retool police forces. “It’s to reinterpret how we do public safety and to reallocate those resources in ways that solve the problem in the areas that I just outlined.”