John Legend says paying police and building prisons are 'expensive and destructive' for society
Singer John Legend believes that the police should be defunded, pointing out that paying cops and building prisons are 'destructive for our society'. Legend has been a very vocal supporter of the Defund the Police movement, which demands that police departments across the country should get stripped off taxpayer dollars in response to George Floyd's death.
Legend said paying police officers' salaries is 'expensive' and 'destructive'. While speaking to the Los Angeles Times, he said, "If we spend the money on the front end, so that folks have a chance to succeed, then we don’t have to spend it on the back end, paying a bunch of cops and building a bunch of prisons and all these other things that are really expensive and destructive for our society."
The singer believes that the public should be very wary of the cops as their versions of incidents are almost always untrue. "We’ve come to the realization that these accounts from the police are almost never to be believed, particularly when they don’t admit any wrongdoing because almost every single time it doesn’t match up with what’s on the camera," he added.
"Camera phones and social media have been a significant difference in this whole movement. These conversations and these uprisings have been happening for literally decades, and nobody believed us when we said this isn’t fair, we’re being abused, we’re being killed with no accountability. People didn’t believe us, and now they finally do because the proof is there," he continued.
Legend's comments come after a large spike in crimes in major US cities. He also took to his Twitter handle to explain exactly why he supports the defund movement. At the beginning of this month, he tweeted, "Police funding takes up a huge portion of our local budgets. Budgets are moral documents, which spell out in black-and-white what our priorities are."
"We have finite amounts of money to spend and right now we spend far too much on policing." He added that defunding the police does not "eliminate law enforcement entirely" but that there should be 'significantly fewer police'.
"It means there should be significantly fewer police and more professionals of other types with expertise in their fields, whether it’s social work, health care, conflict resolution, drug treatment, etc," he wrote.
In the light of George Floyd's death, Legend also shared his support for the Black Lives Matter protests, which erupted after Floyd's death. "These protests are very important, and they get a lot of media attention and have been really moving for the country," he said.
"These protests are very important, and they get a lot of media attention and have been really moving for the country," he shared. Former cop Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for almost nine minutes despite Floyd repeatedly saying that he could not breathe.
Chauvin was charged with second-degree murder in addition to second-degree manslaughter. The three other officers, Tou Thao, J Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane, were charged with aiding and abetting the murder.