Trump Says He Opposes Police Chokeholds, Except in Certain Situations

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/us/politics/trump-police-chokeholds.html

Version 0 of 1.

President Trump appeared to support outlawing chokeholds as a law enforcement practice in an interview with Fox News that aired on Friday, but not before he defended their use in certain situations in a rambling response to a question about police reform efforts.

“I don’t like chokeholds,” Mr. Trump said in answering a question from the interviewer, the anchor Harris Faulkner, during a sit-down recorded on Thursday as Mr. Trump visited Texas, where he held an event with law enforcement officials and black leaders.

Then he immediately suggested there were situations where they were acceptable.

“I will say this, as somebody that, you know, you grow up and you wrestle and you fight and you or you see what happens sometimes if you’re alone and you’re fighting somebody who’s tough and you get somebody in a chokehold,” Mr. Trump said. “What are you going to do, say, oh, and it’s a real bad person and you know that. And they do exist.”

The president spoke as a number of municipalities are discussing banning chokeholds. Some top Republican leaders have said they are open to such an overhaul after George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, died in police custody after a white officer knelt on the man’s neck despite his cries that he could not breathe.

Mr. Trump continued: “I mean, we have some real bad people. You saw that during the last couple of weeks. You saw some very good people protesting. You saw some bad people also. And you get somebody in a chokehold. And what you going to do now? Let go and say, oh, let’s start all over again. I’m not allowed to have you in a chokehold. It’s a tough situation.”

Then he suggested that if a police officer were in a fight with someone, it could be an extenuating circumstance.

“I think the concept of chokehold sounds so innocent, so perfect,” Mr. Trump said. “And then you realize if it’s a one-on-one. Now if it’s two-on-one, that’s a little bit of a different story, depending on the toughness and strength. You know, we’re talking about toughness and strength.” But he went on to say, “Generally speaking, it should be ended.”

The interview aired as the president was at his private golf club in Bedminster, N.J., his first visit there since the fall. He spent Friday in seclusion, with a skeleton crew of aides, preparing for his address to the West Point graduating class of cadets on Saturday.

After two weeks of turmoil between Mr. Trump and top military officials, the president’s advisers are hoping to keep him on script on Saturday, saying only what is on the teleprompter. Mr. Trump spent those two weeks being heavily criticized for exacerbating racial tensions after Mr. Floyd’s death.

The president initially expressed horror at the recording taken by a bystander of a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s neck.

But after protests turned violent in Minneapolis and the police station where Mr. Chauvin was based was set on fire, the president posted on Twitter condemning the unrest and added, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

The phrase was used in 1967 by Walter Headley, a Miami police chief, to describe his crackdown on young black men. Mr. Headley also said he was unconcerned with complaints of police brutality.

But Mr. Trump claimed that he got it from another infamous police chief from that era — Frank Rizzo of Philadelphia, whose history of bad relations with the city’s black community was one of the reasons a statue of him near Philadelphia’s City Hall was removed last week.

“Well, it also comes from a very tough mayor, who might have been police commissioner at the time, but I think mayor of Philadelphia named Frank Rizzo,” the president said, contradicting Ms. Faulkner, who said the phrase came from Mr. Headley. “And he had an expression like that, but I’ve heard it may times from — I think it’s been used many times.”

Mr. Rizzo, a career police officer, became Philadelphia’s police commissioner in 1967 and gained a reputation for bad relations with the city’s black residents that only worsened when he was elected mayor in 1972. He died in 1991. (Mr. Rizzo started overseeing the Police Department the year after Mr. Trump transferred to the Wharton School of Finance at the University of the Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.)

Mr. Trump’s insistence that the looting phrase was from Mr. Rizzo came after Ms. Faulkner, who is African-American, pressed him on why he had used it in the first place because it had such a threatening tone that Twitter quickly prevented users from viewing it without reading a brief notice that the post glorified violence.

“I’m a mom,” Ms. Faulkner said. “And you know, when — and you’ve talked about it, but we haven’t seen you come out and be that consoler in this instance. And the tweets, ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ Why those words?

The president replied that it was “an expression I’ve heard over the years.”

In the interview, he again expressed remorse for Mr. Floyd, and said that officers like Mr. Chauvin, who has been charged in Mr. Floyd’s death, do damage to others on police forces.

At another point, the president said that he had done more for black people than any of his predecessors, before mentioning Abraham Lincoln.

“Let’s take a pass on Abraham Lincoln because he did good. Although it’s always questionable, you know, in other words, the end result,” Mr. Trump said, trailing off.

“Well, we are free, Mr. President,” Ms. Faulkner responded. “He did pretty well.”

The president then ticked off a list of policy changes, like criminal justice reform efforts, funding for historically black colleges and universities, and opportunity zones. He described those decisions in starkly transactional terms.

“The people I did it for — they go on television and thank everybody but me,” Mr. Trump said.

At another point, the president told Ms. Faulkner that his campaign did not intentionally choose June 19 as the date of his first rally since March, when they were stopped because of the threat of the coronavirus. The date is a holiday known as Juneteenth, honoring the day in 1865, after the Civil War had ended, when a Union general read orders in Galveston, Texas, that slaves in the state had been freed.

And the rally is being held in Tulsa, Okla., the site of a bloody massacre of black people in 1921.

“The fact that I’m having a rally on that day, you can really think about that very positively as a celebration,” Mr. Trump said.

A rally, he added, “to me is a celebration.”

“It’s going to be really a celebration, and it’s an interesting date,” the president said. “It wasn’t done for that reason, but it’s an interesting day. But it’s a celebration.”