Barack Obama faced a lot of criticism the past two days for comments he made about the “Defund the Police” movement. “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin was just one of the many to speak out against Obama’s comments.
For context, Obama’s comments come from an interview he had with Peter Hamby, who hosts a Snapchat political show “Good Luck America.” Obama explained that the use of the “Defund the Police” slogan could jeopardize the movement’s goals of enacting meaningful police reform.
“I guess you could use a snappy slogan like, ‘defund the police,’ but you know you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,” Obama said in the interview.
While discussing the controversial interview today, Sunny prefaced her statement by saying she’s a fan of Obama but admitted in this instance, he’s wrong.
“When you think about ‘defund the police,’ that’s not a term that was crowdsourced or tested in focus groups. You know, that’s a term that was born, a rallying cry, out of this over-policing of Black and Brown communities,” Sunny said to her co-hosts.
She continued, “We defund school programs all the time, and they call it defunding school programs, yet no one seems to have a problem with that, but people all of a sudden have a problem with defunding the police,” Sunny said. “I don’t think you should allow people to co-opt the movement and tell protesters what language they should use … President Obama was a community organizer, and I really think that he, you know, knows better.”
Obama’s comments align with other top Democrats who have considered the phrase to be damaging to the Democratic Party.
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