WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden, who heads to Wilmington, North Carolina on Thursday to talk about the economy, is traveling to Charlotte to meet with the families of police officers shot on the job — just a week after sitting down with relatives mourners of two police officers killed in upstate New York.
The visit is expected to take place with little fanfare and behind closed doors, as the White House aims to respect the privacy of grieving families and avoid the appearance that they are using their grief for political purposes. The meeting was expected at the airport, an option that should be the least costly for local authorities, who are still recovering from the deaths, but which would help guarantee the president’s trip.
Once again, Biden will seek to be an empathetic leader for a community suffering from gun violence, while calling for stricter rules around firearms and better funding for law enforcement on the front lines.
Four police officers were killed earlier this week in North Carolina when a wanted man opened fire on a joint agency task force that came to arrest him on a firearms warrant as an ex-felon and fled to escape capture. They were: Sam Poloche and William Elliott of the North Carolina Department of Adult Corrections; Charlotte-Mecklenburg Officer Joshua Eyer; and Deputy U.S. Marshal Thomas Weeks.
Four other officers were injured in the shooting; the suspect was killed. An AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, a 40-caliber pistol and ammunition were found at the scene.
An AR-15 is among the weapons most often used in mass shootings and is the type of weapon Biden talks about when he says the US should ban “assault weapons.” Congress passed the most comprehensive gun safety legislation in decades in 2022, following a horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. But it didn’t go far enough, Biden often says.
And as he campaigns for the 2024 election, Biden has made reducing gun violence a major campaign plank, elusive to Democrats even during the Obama era, as he fends off attacks from Republican challenger Donald Trump that he is soft on crime. and anti-police.
Biden said this week in a statement after the North Carolina killings that the US must “do more to protect our law enforcement officers. That means funding them – so they have the resources they need to do their jobs and keep us safe.”
The violence occurred about two weeks after another fatal police shooting in Syracuse, New York; Lt. Michael Hoosock and Officer Michael Jensen were killed while searching for a driver who fled a traffic stop. After his speech, Biden met with relatives of the two officers.
Biden was already scheduled to come to Syracuse to celebrate Micron Technology’s plans to build a computer chip manufacturing campus, but the local police union said officers were still coming to terms with the deaths and were not satisfied with the president’s trip. and they hoped he would be late.
On Thursday, Biden will also travel to Wilmington, where he announces that his administration is providing states with an additional $3 billion to replace lead pipes across the country, leveraging $5.8 billion in federal funds for water infrastructure projects across the country announced in February.
The money for the pipe replacement comes from one of the administration’s signature legislative victories, the bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill that Biden signed into law in 2021. The infrastructure bill includes more than $50 billion to upgrade the state’s water infrastructure. America.
“It’s past time to take the lead once and for all,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan said Wednesday. “This is a public health issue, an environmental justice issue and a basic human rights issue.”
Biden and his administration are committed to using all available tools “to achieve a 100% lead-free future for all Americans,” Regan told reporters at a White House briefing. “Every day we are one step closer to a future where no child will have to suffer the lasting effects of lead exposure.”
The new round of funding will help pay for projects across the country as Biden seeks to replace all lead pipes in the country.
The EPA estimates that North Carolina has 370,000 lead pipes and $76 million will be allocated to replace them statewide. Biden will also meet with teachers and students at a Wilmington school that replaced a water source with high levels of lead with funding from the law.
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Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Matthew Daly and Josh Boak contributed to this story.
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