Morgan Freeman speaks out against movement to defund the police

NME

Morgan Freeman has spoken out against the ongoing call to defund the police, saying that he is “not the least bit for” the movement.

The actor was asked for his thoughts on police abolition during a recent interview, in light of the ongoing protests against racially motivated police brutality.

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“Police work is, aside from all the negativity around it, it is very necessary for us to have them and most of them are guys that are doing their job,” Freeman told Selina Hill on Black Enterprise.

“They’re going about their day-to-day jobs. There are some police the never pulled their guns except in rage, that sort of thing. I don’t know.”

Freeman spoke to the Hill with Frankie Faison, his co-star on his upcoming film The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain.

“Well, I agree with Morgan,” Faison told Hill. “I’m certainly not in favor of defunding the policemen.”

The topic has come under great speculation over the past 18 months especially, following the racially-motivated murder of George Floyd by policemen in May 2020 and the international protests that followed.

Many celebrities came forward to voice their support of police abolition, with The Weeknd, Lizzo and John Legend signing an open letter calling for police budgets to be cut following Floyd’s death.

The open letter was launched by Patrisse Cullors, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter and a founding member of the Movement 4 Black Lives (M4BL) and calls for local officials to cut police spending and budgets and instead increase spending on health care, education and community programmes.

“The time has come to defund the police,” the letter states. It continues: “Policing and militarization overwhelmingly dominate the bulk of national and local budgets…We call for defunding of police and for those dollars to be rerouted to create a public national healthcare system.”

You can read the letter in full here.

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