Ilhan Omar challenger says push to disband Minneapolis police department is 'reckless'
Minnesota Republican congressional candidate Lacy Lee Johnson speaks out on 'Fox & Friends.'
Lacy Lee Johnson, a Republican running for the seat held by Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., called the Minneapolis City Council "reckless" for moving to dismantle the police after George Floyd's death.
"We have a reckless city council making reckless decisions about the safety and health of our community by passing this law to disband, stop funding the police. They are putting our community at risk," Johnson told "Fox and Friends" on Tuesday.
His comments came after Omar and a majority of the city council members supported dismantling the police department.
During a march to defund the police, Omar said: “The Minneapolis Police Department is rotten to the root and so when we dismantle it, we get rid of that cancer and we allow for something beautiful to rise."
OMAR, ROMNEY AMONG LAWMAKERS JOINING GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS AMID SIGNS OF STRONGER ANTI-POLICE TONE
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Nine of the council’s 12 members appeared with activists at a rally in a city park Sunday afternoon and vowed to end policing as the city currently knows it. “It is clear that our system of policing is not keeping our communities safe,” Lisa Bender, the council president, said. “Our efforts at incremental reform have failed, period.”
But Johnson argued that criminals would take advantage of the situation and that defunding the police was a "bad decision all around."
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"They are making Minneapolis an unattractive place for tourists and businesses, and they’re just not putting enough thought into what they’re doing. So it’s just a reckless decision, Steve, of how they go about doing this," he told Fox News host Steve Doocy.
"To show you how reckless it is, they have presented no alternatives to the police, defunding the police. So it’s just a bad decision all the way around."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.