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June 8 (UPI) -- President Donald Trump dismissed calls to defund police and praised the nation's officers during a roundtable discussion with law enforcement officials on Monday. Trump responded to calls to defund police sparked by the police-involved killing of Geroge Floyd in Minneapolis, where city council members over the weekend pledged to disband the police department.
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"There won't be defunding, there won't be dismantling of our police and there is not going to be any disbanding of our police," said Trump.
The president went on to say that he believes a vast majority of police officers do their jobs properly and only some bad actors must be dealt with.
"We want to make sure we don't have any bad actors in there and sometimes, you'll see some horrible things like we witnessed recently, but 99 -- I say 99.9, but let's go with 99 percent of them are great, great people and they've done jobs that are record-setting," he said.
Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said earlier that Trump "is appalled by the defund the police movement." Trump has criticized former Vice President Joe Biden, his presumptive opponent in the 2020 election, tweeting Sunday that Biden and other Democrats will seek to defund the police.
Biden's campaign on Monday said that he does not support the defund the police movement and House Democrats unveiled sweeping police reforms and measures to make it easier to prosecute officers in court, but did not include plans to defund police.
Trump's comments came after the mayors of New York City and Los Angeles said they would take steps to decrease police funding and nine members of the Minneapolis City Council formed a veto-proof majority in support of defunding and disbanding the city's police department.
"They want to end the police department -- quote end the police department in Minneapolis ... What does that mean? End it?" Trump asked. "They abandoned their police precinct, something I've never seen before. You had a mayor that asked them to abandon and now they've abandoned the mayor, it looks like."
Global protests calling for a range of societal changes, including an end to systemic racism as well as police reform or abolition sparked by the recent deaths of Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and many other black people throughout the nation's history.
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was arrested and fired days after Floyd was killed on May 25, while three other since-fired officers present at the scene were also arrested last week.
A judge on Monday set unconditional bail for Chauvin at $1.25 million after charges against him were escalated from third-degree murder to second-degree murder.
