N.E. Police Union Endorses Trump, Compares Critics to I-93 Protesters

Photo via AP

The New England Police Benevolent Association endorsed Republican frontrunner Donald Trump for president Thursday night at an event in Portsmouth, after Trump vowed to sign an executive order making the killing of a police officer a capital offense.

“Police forces throughout the country have had a hard time. Lot of people killed,” Trump told NEPBA members. “Lot of people killed.”

The meeting was peacefully protested by critics of Trump’s other proposed policies, most notably a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Trump has described the ban as no different from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, something even conservative demigod Ronald Regan apologized for in 1988.

When pressed by Jim Armstrong of WBZ-TV, NEPBA executive director Jerry Flynn offered terse remarks for the demonstrators, which included a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty and a marching band playing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land.”

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“Those are the same people who stood out in the middle of 93, lying down on the sidewalk saying, ‘Black lives matter,'” Flynn said. “Well you know what? Police lives, all lives matter as far as I’m concerned. And I’m telling you right now what we endorsed a candidate who best serves our membership. He said tonight that he would be for the death penalty, the federal death penalty for the killing of a police officer, corrections officer in the line of duty, and that’s what my members wanted to hear.”

Flynn refers to the so-called Somerville 18, a group of Black Lives Matter activists who brought traffic on I-93 to a standstill back in January by joining arms and encasing them in cement barrels, protesting “police and state violence against Black people.” Most managed to avoid jail time in favor of community service, after Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone called for their charges to be dropped.