As Mandela Barnes Went Soft On Crime, Law Enforcement Left Him In the Dust

Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes’s years of criticizing police has left him with few allies in the Wisconsin law enforcement community—a rift that his opponent, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, has been relentlessly highlighting on the campaign trail.

While Barnes has scrambled to distance himself from the “defund the police” movement, his campaign has had a hard time finding officers willing to make his case in public. Of the 72 sheriffs in Wisconsin, only 2 have endorsed Barnes, compared with 51 who are backing Johnson—including a handful of Democrats and independents.

Last week, two police officers asked Barnes to remove their names from his sparse list of supporters, drawing attention to his difficulty on this issue. Meanwhile, the Johnson campaign has been steadily consolidating police support. The Milwaukee Police Association endorsed Johnson on Tuesday, citing Barnes’s soft-on-crime policies, including his proposal to cut the state’s prison population in half.

The growing divide between the candidates comes as 61 percent of Wisconsin voters said they are “very concerned” about crime, the electorate’s second highest concern after inflation, according to a Marquette University poll.

Pete Deates, the president of the Kenosha Professional Police Association Board, which endorsed Johnson this month, told the Washington Free Beacon Barnes’s sparse list of supporters—was “kind of comical.”

“It doesn’t surprise me one bit. He has shown and said things that prove he does not support law enforcement,” said Deates.

Deates said he is still disturbed by Barnes’s response to the Kenosha police shooting of Jacob Blake in 2020, which sparked days of deadly anti-police riots in the city. Barnes, who was lieutenant governor at the time, blamed the shooting on police misconduct and suggested it was racially motivated—claims that have not been substantiated by multiple investigations.

Deates said Barnes’s comments “100 percent” fueled the rioters that flocked to the city and the eruption of violence that followed. “It gave the people who have a negative view of law enforcement carte blanche,” he said.

While Barnes’s campaign says he does not support defunding the police, his close ties to the movement has irked the law enforcement community.

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases