The head of a Pennsylvania police union endorsed Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick on Wednesday, citing Democratic senator Bob Casey's recent appearance with an activist group that has called to defund police.
Casey appeared at a campaign event on Tuesday with Indivisible Philadelphia, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The group, which has called for "fewer officers on the street terrorizing Black and Brown residents" and a reduction in Philadelphia's police budget, proclaimed in 2020 that it "won't stop until they #DefundThePolice." It endorsed Casey after Tuesday's event. Its parent organization, the Indivisible Project, has pushed to defund police and federal immigration agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.
According to Christopher Eiserman, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police in Delaware County, Casey's alignment with "defund the police activists is alarming and extremely dangerous."
"Casey's record on crime and policing is more in line with Indivisible Philadelphia's agenda than with the people of this great commonwealth," Eiserman said at a press conference Wednesday. Eiserman is the deputy police chief of Folcroft, a borough outside Philadelphia. He endorsed McCormick, touting the presumptive Republican nominee as "a law and order Senate candidate that will work with the police and not against us."
Eiserman's union is the latest police group to endorse McCormick over Casey, considered one of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats up for reelection this year. Forty-seven sheriffs endorsed McCormick last month. Casey leads McCormick by just 4 points in a recent Emerson poll, a narrow margin for a three-term incumbent. Republicans have sought to link Casey to soft-on-crime policies, highlighting his support for progressive prosecutors.
While Casey says he supports police, he has praised organizations behind the movement to defund law enforcement, such as Black Lives Matter. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, Casey called for an end to "systematic racism in policing." In August 2020, he praised sports leagues for boycotting games over the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis. Blake, who is black, was shot after he pulled a knife on a police officer during an arrest related to a sexual assault case.