With violent crime and murder rates spiking across America’s big cities, Joe Biden on Monday held a meeting with state and local leaders in an obvious bid to distance himself from the Democrats’ indisputable embrace and promotion of the “defund the police” movement following the death of George Floyd last May.

Biden and his administration have sought to spin the spike in violent crime on two disingenuous causes: guns and lack of police funding.

In his meeting with law enforcement officials, Biden pointed to the $350 billion allocated to states in COVID relief funding, contending that this money should instead be used to hire more police — as if the root problem were lack of funding. This first pivot was Biden’s attempt to, again, divert from the reality that Democrats were (and remain) the protagonists of the disastrous and deadly “defund” movement nationwide.

This was a more subtle attempt at forwarding the same lie put forth by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who last week blamed Republicans for defunding the police, a claim so blatantly false that even the leftist Washington Post gave it “three Pinocchios”.

Biden’s other pivot was, as always, to blame “gun violence.” As Mark Alexander observes: “Anyone who blames ‘gun violence’ as the cause of violent crime across the nation has nothing to offer but failed political rhetoric. Violence is not a ‘gun problem.’ It is a cultural problem — the result of generations of failed Democrat Party urban social policies.”

As former congressman and federal prosecutor Trey Gowdy keenly points out: “Gun prosecutions went down when [Obama and Biden] were in office. So, what we know is ‘defunding the police’ doesn’t work, ‘bond reform’ doesn’t work, these so-called ‘progressive prosecutors’ don’t work. I got a really crazy novel idea. How about actually enforce … all the gun laws we currently have.”

The root cause of the 20% increase over last year in the number of officers leaving the force is tied directly to tanking morale. The Democrats’ anti-police rhetoric — insisting without evidence, and often with evidence to the contrary, that law enforcement across the country are “systemically racist” and calling for the defunding of police — has served to severely erode police morale, and has served as the catalyst for a steady exodus of officers from the force.

The truth is, these longtime Democrat-run cities are now reaping the consequences of their poor policy decisions — decisions that have served to erode the nuclear family and sound moral values in favor of leftist social engineering ideology, which seeks to promote the state as the savior of society. As these bankrupt policies fail, Democrat leaders scapegoat the police, as if their enforcement of the law were the cause of people breaking the law.

No amount of money shoveled by Joe Biden toward beleaguered police departments will do anything to boost police morale or address the root causes behind the nationwide spike in violent crime. Nor will their continued vilification of law enforcement as “racist” and their disingenuous targeting of Americans’ Second Amendment rights.