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Biden will use his visit to the small city of Wilkes-Barre to
lay out plans that include asking Congress for $37 billion for
crime prevention programs and providing some of that money to
police to reduce gun crime.
The request, unveiled in budget proposals earlier this month,
will include $13 billion over the next five years to hire and
train an additional 100,000 police officers.
Ahead of the elections in November, many Republican candidates
are portraying Democrats as unwilling to fight growing crime
rates in some parts of the country.
They are also trying to tie them to the "defund the police"
movement that arose out of racial justice protests in 2020,
although many Democrats, including Biden, have never supported
slashing police funds.
As in 2020, when Biden was elected president, Pennsylvania will
be a key battleground state in November and in the next
presidential election in 2024.
It is home to one of a handful of competitive Senate races that
will determine whether Democrats can hold onto their razor-thin
majority in the U.S. Senate.
But some Democratic candidates in the state and elsewhere have
wrestled with whether to join Biden on the campaign trail, with
some fearing his low approval ratings could drag down their
campaigns.
John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in
Pennsylvania and the state's current lieutenant governor, was
not expected to join Biden for the event on Tuesday but planned
to meet with him at another Pennsylvania event on next week.
(Reporting by Nandita Bose and Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington;
Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
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