More broadly, the Biden administration has emphasized that it supports full funding for law enforcement. A companion bill in the House also passed, but the two measures have not yet been reconciled. His staff pointed to his co-sponsorship of the Invest to Protect Act, a measure passed unanimously by the Senate that seeks to help small law enforcement agencies with training, equipment, mental health support, officer recruitment and retention. ![]() Warnock’s campaign argued that the senator had done the opposite of what Walker claimed. Raphael Warnock outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on July 30, 2015, a few months after giving a sermon that later drew criticism in an ad by his Senate opponent, Herschel Walker. However, Warnock’s sermon was in 2015 he assumed his first elected office in the Senate in January 2021. It gives the impression that Warnock cut police funding right after calling police "thugs." The way Walker phrased his ad is also misleading. ![]() We found no evidence that Warnock has sought to cut police funding. The bottom line is that Warnock used the word "thug" to describe certain specific police behaviors, evoking police violence in Selma and referencing police practices in Ferguson. You can sometimes wear the colors of the state and behave like a thug." You can wear all kinds of colors and be a thug. Warnock went on to say, "So, in Ferguson, police power (is) showing up in a kind of gangster and thug mentality. The truth of the matter is, the road to Ferguson goes through Selma, 50 years later." "They were met with overwhelming brute force. "And as they gathered in Selma - or was it Ferguson?" Warnock said at one point. This enforcement of spiraling penalties on poor and mostly Black residents prompted Warnock’s "thug" comments, as he equated the baton beatings on the Pettus bridge with the lower-profile but grinding injustices of Ferguson. He urged congregants to read the Justice Department report on Ferguson, saying it showed how ordinary Ferguson residents were forced to carry the weight of the criminal justice system by having to pay fines and penalties they had no realistic chance of paying. Warnock’s sermon expounded on the differences between God’s power and man’s, periodically circling back to both Selma and Ferguson. The confrontation is considered one of the key turning points of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The sermon also came one day after the 50th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," in which law enforcement officers beat marchers who were peacefully advocating for voting rights while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. ![]() The department issued a report highly critical of how officials ran the local police and government, including an elaborate system of fines and penalties that disproportionately affected low-income Black residents. Warnock’s sermon came days after the Justice Department declined to prosecute the officer who shot Brown. He gave the sermon about seven months after police shot and killed an unarmed Black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, an event that led to widespread local protests, some of which turned violent. This appears to refer to remarks Warnock made in a sermon on March 8, 2015, when he was pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Warnock’s use of the word ‘thugs’ in a sermon ![]() Herschel Walker, Republican candidate for Georgia Senate, speaks during a press conference on Friday Septemin Port Wentworth, Georgia.
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