Washington DC – Joe Biden announced on Wednesday his plan to allow for increased police department funding across the nation as a means of combatting violent crime rates.

According to the New York Times, state and local governments will be able to use their $350 billion in coronavirus relief funds to hire law enforcement officers and provide paid overtime for community policing.

Cities with particularly high crime rates may even hire more officers than they had pre-Covid.

The announcement comes just days after Biden signed a bill to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. The occasion commemorates the day in June 1865 when the news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached Galveston, Texas.

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The president's incentive to recognize Juneteenth came in large part thanks to increased reckoning with systemic racism in America, a process spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Black Lives Matter itself was born as a response to a pattern of police brutality against Black Americans and exploded with the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.

Despite touting his administration's commitment to tackling systemic racism, Biden has now managed to undermine one of the most central demands of the movement: reallocating money from police budgets to community and social services.

The $350 million in funds may also be used to fund summer programs for at-risk youth, Biden said, but the gesture is like a drop in the bucket to progressive activists decrying systematized violence toward Black Americans perpetrated by US law enforcement.

Biden is also looking to close loopholes in firearm background checks in order to lower homicide rates, announcing that he has instructed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to revoke the licenses of gun dealers "the first time that they violate federal law" by not conducting background checks.

The president further said the Justice Department is creating "strike forces" to tackle illegal gun trafficking in five cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington DC.