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Last March, down near the end of his first State of the Union address, President\u00a0Joe Biden<\/strong> reached a somber passage where he described the recent fatal shooting of two New York City police officers. He asked for bipartisan support in pursuing both \u201csafety and equal justice.\u201d And then the president leaned into one particular message. \u201cWe should all agree the answer is not to defund the police,\u201d Biden\u00a0said<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training\u2014resources and training they need to protect our communities.\u201d<\/p>\n Nearly a year later police departments have plenty of money\u2014and yet Biden\u2019s second State of the Union arrives in the shadow of a fresh tragedy, the brutal beating of Tyre Nichols by Memphis cops. Nichols, a 29-year-old Black FedEx worker, died three days after being pulled from his car during what should have been a routine traffic stop. The ugly assault was captured on body-cam video; five of the Memphis officers involved were fired.<\/p>\n The particulars of Nichols\u2019s death are significant, but so is the fact that it is only the latest in a long string of episodes where cops have abused Black Americans. On Tuesday night, in front of a national TV audience, Biden should seize the raw, painful moment to make an even more forceful case for the middle ground between defunding the police and blindly backing the blue.\u00a0<\/p>\n In many ways Biden is the ideal president to advance the argument and have it heard across the political spectrum. His emphatic call last year to fund the police was partly a political calculation: Heading into the midterms, Biden was trying to inoculate Democratic candidates against perennial Republican fearmongering that the party is soft on crime. But his statement was also consistent with who Biden has been for a very long time: a mainstream ally of law enforcement, going all the way back to 1994, when he was a Delaware senator and a\u00a0principal sponsor of the federal crime bill that helped drive down violent crime but also escalated drug-offense penalties and incarceration. In 2020, more than 190 law enforcement officials\u00a0endorsed<\/a> Biden against\u00a0Donald Trump.<\/strong><\/p>\n All of which gives Biden, as president, the credibility and profile to push, loud and clear, for an overhaul in how the country keeps its citizens safe, without being demonized as a coddler of criminals. Taking sizable amounts of money away from police departments isn\u2019t going to happen, and in most cases probably shouldn\u2019t. But Biden can advocate to change how that money is spent, with more dollars targeted to programs like violence interruption, and to redefine the scope of police work so that cops, for instance, aren\u2019t the first ones responding to mentally ill people in distress. The president should also emphatically call on police unions, which are frequently key impediments to change, to be part of the solution.\u00a0<\/p>\n Biden\u2019s Department of Justice has already taken some welcome, if reactive, steps toward reducing police misconduct, reviving \u201cpattern or practice\u201d investigations of troubled municipal forces, a tactic that was halted by the Trump administration. \u201cIt is absolutely night and day,\u201d says Minnesota attorney general\u00a0Keith Ellison,<\/strong> whose office successfully prosecuted former police officer\u00a0Derek Chauvin<\/strong> for the murder of George Floyd. \u201cIt\u2019s the difference between caring and not giving a damn. As soon as Biden came in they started investigations in Minneapolis and a whole bunch of other places.\u201d<\/p>\n Biden, during his first year in office, supported the 2021 reintroduction of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, but it stalled in the Senate, partly due to Republican opposition to a nationwide database to track police misconduct. In the wake of Nichols\u2019s death, there have been fitful talks about reviving the Floyd Act, including by Vice President\u00a0Kamala Harris,<\/strong>\u00a0who vowed to push for its passage at Nichols\u2019s funeral. Republican obstructionism that extends from domestic to foreign policy makes that highly unlikely\u2014a reality Biden will be reminded of when he delivers his second State of the Union standing in front of a new Speaker of the House,\u00a0Kevin McCarthy,<\/strong>\u00a0whose majority is currently intent on pushing the nation toward default\u00a0by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless Biden agrees to budget cuts.<\/p>\n That standoff will likely be one of the other subjects the president discusses Tuesday. Biden will probably plead for a bipartisan resolution even as he tries to make clear which party is creating this looming economic crisis. He\u2019ll have plenty more on his agenda: the need to continue to send weapons and money to help Ukraine fight off Russia\u2019s invasion and his administration\u2019s decision to declare an end to the COVID public health emergency\u2014after extending it one more time, into May. He\u2019ll likely tout the latter as progress, though the move is driven more by politics than by science: Congress hasn\u2019t appropriated any more money, even though the World Health Organization says the pandemic continues, and\u00a0pushing the emergency\u2019s bureaucratic end a few months helps prop up\u00a0border restrictions<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n