Could MORE police funding—and thus better training—have saved Daunte Wright?

When Danielle Neuschwanger got her degree in criminal justice, she knew she would end up working in some capacity with law enforcement. Her career path led her through the system where she learned that law enforcement organizations in America are underfunded, not overfunded as Black Lives Matter and other radical leftist groups claim.

Watch this interview on Locals or listen to it on Apple Podcasts.

Now that she’s running for Governor of Colorado, she’s speaking out and offering common sense solutions to reduce crime while increasing prosperity across the board. We need police reform, she said, but defunding law enforcement is not the right answer.

“I know there are opportunities within our system because I have personally dealt with them,” she said. “And so right now we have this whole culture of ‘we have to defund the police.’ But I’m here to tell you that the police have never actually been funded appropriately.”

It isn’t just the Black Lives Matter and Neo-Marxist groups pushing the “Defund the Police” agenda. Many politicians across the nation have been vocal about taking down law enforcement as it is today and replacing it with a kinder, gentler, ineffective alternative.

“We have politicians who will bend over backwards to not support the police because they’re afraid to have difficult conversations,” Neuschwanger continued.

Are police receiving too much funding? By no means. Budgets were stretched thin long before the “Defund the Police” movement reared its ugly head. Departments across the nation were feeling the heat in the past. Now, things are getting worse.

“We have historically only given our law enforcement the bare minimum to get the job done,” she said. “Most of them are paid under what you can make at McDonald’s in a year, and these are the same guys that strap on a badge and gun to come protect the city.”

It really comes down to training and keeping the best people, then equipping them with the resources and knowledge to keep us safe. Suspects have rights which BLM and others claim to defend, but the easiest way to make sure there rights are protected is to improve, not weaken law enforcement.

“We don’t pay them to have additional training, we barely get them through state-mandated training, and a lot of times these departments are so poorly funded that they can’t even get rid of the police officers they want to who have those problems, who are not the greatest officers and not the greatest role models, because they can’t afford to rehire new deputies and police officers and train them,” she said.

She brought up Daunte Wright, the Black man shot by a White female police officer in Brooklyn Center, Minneapolis. The officer who shot him has resigned, admitting that she thought she had pulled her taser when in fact she pulled her gun.

“We just saw an officer-involved shooting this weekend in Minneapolis,” she said. “The excuse we were given was she accidentally reached for her taser instead of her gun. That’s a training issue.”

For law enforcement, training must be ongoing. It’s such a challenging profession that it needs to be constantly honed with new skills taught and old skills sharpened. That is happening less and less today as police are being stretched even thinner than they were in the recent past.

“I would want to ask the question of what was your training like prior to this?” she said. “Did you have enough funding? Could that life have been saved if we would have properly funded and trained that officer and implemented remedial training throughout the year?”

We will never know what could have prevented Wright’s death, but more training couldn’t have hurt. For an officer to pull her gun instead of her taser seems like something that repetition and proper training could have alleviated.

“A lot of these situations that we’re running into with police brutality and Black deaths by police officers and just officer-involved shootings, it comes down to a lack of training and a lack of funding,” Neuschwanger said.

As Governor, Neuschwanger would help law enforcement in Colorado receive the funding they need to better protect the people, both law-abiding and criminal.

“Part of my platform, especially in Colorado, let’s refund our police but let’s do so that makes sense for the community so that we have community partnerships and we’re implementing verbal de-escalation training and safe body positioning training and we’re not going to lethal options right away,” she said.

Neuschwanger also discussed her personal history with the pro-life movement, how Hispanics are being weaponized in Colorado for political purposes and how the rising Colorado drug problems can be solved properly. You can find her stances and donate to her campaign on her website.

The way to fix many of the issues we have today in law enforcement is to properly fund the departments and train the officers. This will make them better at their jobs and likely stop many tragedies like what happened in Brooklyn Center.

Watch this interview on Locals or listen to it on Apple Podcasts.