Meghan McCain claims push to 'defund the police' is helping Trump reelection bid

"The View" co-host Meghan McCain warned on Tuesday that Democrats were hurting their party's electoral prospects by countenancing the idea that local governments should "defund the police" after George Floyd's death.

"If you're explaining, you're losing and there's a lot of explaining going on on this," McCain said. "... If you mean reform, say 'reform.' If you mean defund, say 'defund.' People are confused."

McCain noted that Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., had called for the dismantling of the Minneapolis police department, which employed the officer who knelt on Floyd's neck for more than 8 minutes on May 25. Floyd died soon after and the former officer, Kenneth Chauvin, faces murder charges.

"Listen, you guys can spin and say everything you want," she told her fellow "View" co-hosts. "I know that politics at the end of the day, unfortunately, is real simple and it is about slogans. And 'defund the police' is a great one for the Trump campaign."

TOP DEMS PUNT ON 'DEFUND THE POLICE' QUESTION

Earlier, co-host Sunny Hostin had pushed back on the idea that "defund the police" could be relegated to a "slogan."

"The biggest misunderstanding is that people think that defunding the police means abolishing the police and that's not true," she said. "There are three different reactions to what you can do in terms of combatting police brutality, especially police brutality in black and brown communities ... You can either reform the police departments, you can either defund the police departments, or you can disband the police departments."

Hostin added that when reforms like implicit bias training don't seem to work, the next step would be to transfer money from the police departments to social services.

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"The last and most rarest form of combatting police brutality is disbanding police departments," she said. "It is rarely done. It was done in, I think about seven years ago, in Camden, New Jersey. What happened there is, it's disbanded.

"Officers are then basically -- they re-apply for their positions. People in the community re-apply for their positions and police safety -- public safety --they're retrained, but it looks very different," she continued. "It's reimagined. Again, it's so rare that it's only been done a handful of times really, and it hasn't really been done in big metropolitan cities.

"But it's an option that people are now considering. This discussion, by the way, was going on when I was a community prosecutor in the late '90s. [Former New York City Police Commissioner and LAPD Chief] Bill Bratton said yesterday it's been going on for about 50 years or more. So, this is not a new discussion and I'm surprised people are relegating it to a slogan because that's not what this is about. This is about saving lives."

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