Left-wing Texas Senate candidate James Talarico says he opposes defunding the police and has a "proven track record" of supporting law enforcement. Perhaps that is true now, but in 2022, he called to slash police and prison budgets and redirect the money to social programs, a move he argued would "make prisons obsolete," video footage shows.
Talarico's remarks came during a 2022 speech he delivered to a group of Texas inmates graduating from a high school diploma program. After approvingly quoting the prominent prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore—Talarico described her as an "anti-prison activist" who said "prisons are a catchall solution to our social problems"—he laid out his vision for a "world without prisons."
"Prisons allow us to ignore the consequences of systemic racism and global capitalism," Talarico said. "If we took just half of what we spent on wars, prisons, and policing and spent it on education, health care, and jobs, we could make prisons obsolete."
"It's hard to imagine a world without prisons," he continued. "But it was also hard to imagine a world without telegrams and cassette tapes. Just because it was hard to imagine doesn't mean you shouldn't. We won't build it overnight, but dreaming is the first step."
The speech aligns Talarico with "Defund the Police" activists who called to redirect police funding to social welfare programs at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. It also contradicts claims from Talarico that he does not support defunding police.
When Republicans pointed to comments Talarico made opposing police officers on school property, arguing that he supports defunding police, Talarico's campaign pushed back, telling Fox News that Talarico "opposes defunding the police and has a proven track record voting to send billions of dollars to support law enforcement." As a representative in the Republican-dominated Texas House of Representatives, Talarico has indeed voted in favor of spending bills that provide additional police funding, though it does not appear that police would be a priority for Talarico if he had control over the legislation.
"If violence is systemic then love must be systemic," Talarico said in his 2022 speech. "What would a nonviolent government look like? Instead of criminalizing, policing, and imprisoning communities, a nonviolent government would refuse to repay evil with evil and instead respond to evil with good."
Doing so, Talarico argued, would consist of embracing the "restorative justice" practices of Native American tribes, a reference to a "Native peacemaking process" that "involves bringing together victims, offenders and their supporters to get to the bottom of a problem," according to the International Institute for Restorative Practices. That approach would "disrupt the spiral of violence," Talarico said.
"Restorative justice takes its inspiration from indigenous communities in which the goal of a justice system is to disrupt the spiral of violence, not contribute to it," he said. "In a restorative justice model, the question is how to right a wrong, not how to punish a wrong. … Restorative justice is not easy. Throwing people in cages is much easier. But it's the only way to achieve true public safety. It's the only way to achieve love in public."
Talarico's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The quote Talarico cited from the prison abolitionist, Gilmore, comes from her 2007 "scholar activism" book, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, which argues that prisons expanded in California in the 1980s and '90s not in response to crime but in an attempt to crack down on "militant anticapitalism" and "antiracist" activists. She emerged as an intellectual leader of the movement to defund the police in the wake of George Floyd's death.
"No abolitionist who is a true abolitionist wants to save money," she told the Intercept in June 2020. "What, therefore, we're talking about is divest from police, prisons, courts, and so forth and put those money and human resources into schools, social work, a Green New Deal or Red Green New Deal, economic activity—things that communities, municipalities, states can do."
There are other signs that Talarico jumped aboard the bandwagon to defund the police. In June 2020, his state representative campaign donated $2,500 to Austin Justice Coalition, a left-wing nonprofit that worked to lower Austin Police Department's funding to the "minimum possible" amount, according to the New York Post. The left-wing firm where Talarico worked as an "equitable education" consultant, MAYA Consulting, contributed $5,000 to Austin Justice Coalition around the same time, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Talarico has represented a deep-blue state house district in Austin since 2018, attracting attention for making controversial statements like, "God is non-binary," and for introducing left-wing legislation like his 2021 bill requiring every large public school district in Texas to hire a "diversity, equity, and inclusion officer."
He has attempted to present a more moderate image as he runs to represent a state that backed President Donald Trump by 14 points rather than a district that backed Kamala Harris by nearly 50 points. Around the time he launched his Senate campaign, Talarico updated his campaign website to scrub statements that expressed support for "trans kids" and "bold, progressive ideas" and denounced "Republican extremism," the Free Beacon reported. In their place is messaging that credits Talarico with fighting "billionaire mega-donors" and says the "biggest divide in this country is not left vs. right" but "top vs. bottom."
