Vanita Gupta’s shifting views on defunding police, decriminalizing drugs

— 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.

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 and sensitive investigations into police departments in Baltimore, Chicago and Ferguson, Mo., after…