Former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump has vowed to protect police officers from legal accountability if he is re-elected, stressing that the US is experiencing a violent crime wave driven by the Black Lives Matter movement and illegal border crossings.

In a speech to police officers in Michigan on Tuesday, the former president attributed the purported crisis to his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, describing her as one of the "Marxist district attorneys" who was anti-police and pro-criminal during her time as San Francisco’s district attorney in the 2000s.

Simultaneously, Trump expressed frustration over his legal challenges, including his fraud convictions in New York and other pending prosecutions.

“They go after guys like me, but they don’t go after guys that kill people,” he said.

Surrounded by local sheriffs in Howell, a small city near Detroit where white supremacists recently marched with chants like "We love Hitler, we love Trump" and carried "White Lives Matter" signs, Trump portrayed a scenario where Americans are afraid to leave their homes due to crime.

“It’s just insane, but you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get … whatever it may be,” he said.

The former president asserted that this supposed crime wave emerged following the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

“Since Comrade Kamala Harris took office, her administration’s crime statistics show she’s presided over a 43% increase in violent crime. These are all government numbers,” he stressed.

Official statistics reportedly reveal that violent crime in the US is at nearly a 50-year low. Despite this, Trump promised to "crackdown on local Marxist district attorneys who refuse to uphold the law" while criticizing the way police officers' lives are being disrupted for "simply doing their jobs."

“Over the past four years, the Marxist left has waged a vicious war on law enforcement in our country. They’ve taken away the dignity and the spirit and the life of some of these police officers, and that’s why you see it – the crime is so out of control in our country,” he stated.

Trump went on to say that the police “have a lot of difficulty with the laws of our land."

“We’re going to get rid of that difficulty because they shouldn’t have difficulty, our police,” he added.

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Trump emphasized, “We’re going to be guaranteeing immunities.”

The former president charged Harris with having a "pro-crime, anti-police record."

“She repeatedly endorsed defunding the police,” he said. “If she ever had a chance, she would do whatever she could to defund the police because that’s where her spirit is, that’s where her heart is, and we can’t have a president like that.”

Dive deeper

In 2020, then-Senator Harris supported the "defund the police" movement following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis and the increased prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Harris argued that it was valid for BLM to question the allocation of funds toward "militarizing" police departments instead of investing in social services, housing, and education.

Here's a brief history of how US police have violently suppressed protesters, focusing on the actions of the NYPD. pic.twitter.com/4ZvItUtYrP

— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) May 4, 2024

“This whole movement is about, rightly, saying we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” she told the radio program Ebro in the Morning Podcast.

The former President also asserted that Harris was responsible for an increase in shoplifting during her tenure as California's attorney general a decade ago.

“She came up with a concept of, $950 and below you don’t even get prosecuted. So guys are walking into stores with calculators to figure [it] out,” he said, clearly amusing the police officers around him. 

“Did you know that they have calculators adding it up? They want to make sure they’re under $950, but it didn’t matter, because they didn’t prosecute the ones that went over either,” he added.

In reality, there is no such policy in California, and the accusation seems to stem from a 2014 ballot measure that reclassified certain thefts and misdemeanors. Trump attributed much of the purported rise in crime to individuals crossing the Mexican border, placing some of the blame on Harris as the alleged "border tsar", despite evidence that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than US citizens. He also claimed that some Latin American countries are sending their criminals to the US.

“We have criminals from all over the world pouring into our country right now,” he said.

The former president is also dealing with criminal prosecutions related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, and his management of classified documents.

“Anytime I fly over a state, they indict you. Got indicted more than the great Alphonse Capone,” he said.

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