Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Tina Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice and Daniel Payne Earlier this month, the mayor of Wilmington, Del. got a surprise call. It was the president. JOE BIDEN was checking on the status of three police officers who had been shot while responding to a domestic violence call, an official familiar with the call told West Wing Playbook. (All three survived.) The conversation, which had not been previously reported and which the White House did not publicize, reflects the personal touch Biden applies as well as the ties he continues to feel to his home state. But it is also a vestige of his long history as a “law and order” Democrat, to the point that he has drawn criticism from his own party for his views on criminal justice. “More cops clearly means less crime," he wrote in a 2002 op-ed after the FBI reported an increase in crime nationally. Biden is now attempting to navigate both a rise in violent crime in parts of the country while simultaneously pushing a police reform bill in Congress crafted in the aftermath of the murder of GEORGE FLOYD with the support of many Black Lives Matter leaders. During the campaign, he resisted calls to support defunding the police while also arguing for reform. The balancing act will continue this week. Biden is set to deliver remarks tomorrow evening laying out his administration’s anti-crime strategy as some polls show him vulnerable on the issue. And today, the administration also endorsed a bill that would end drug sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine offenses, standards that Biden helped enact decades ago but are now widely seen by Democrats as racist given their disproportionate impact on Black people. The White House is also trying to manage relationships with civil rights groups and police unions. JIM PASCO, executive director of Fraternal Order of Police, told West Wing Playbook that the conversations with the White House and the Justice Department have been “civil and constructive and collaborative” and “there has been no lack of access.” He added, “I’d characterize [the relationship] as good, again given the dynamic tensions that obviously exist." The engagement hasn’t been universal across the administration, however. Pasco noted that despite being the largest police union in the country, his organization hasn’t heard from the Labor Department. “In all probability we'll hear from them over time but I'm astounded,” he said. “We talk daily, multiple times a day to DOJ and DHS but from a Cabinet standpoint, it's kind of a three-legged stool for us with Labor being the third. But right now it's a two legged stool." The Labor Department did not respond. But in a statement, White House deputy press secretary ANDREW BATES said: “As the President said in his address to a joint session of Congress, ‘The vast majority of men and women wearing the uniform and a badge serve our communities, and they serve them honorably.’ And at the same time, ‘we have to come together to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the people they serve, to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system, and to enact police reform in George Floyd’s name.’” Biden has had a lot of confidence in his ability to navigate these fraught political dynamics. In 2014, two New York City police officers — RAFAEL RAMOS and WENJIAN LIU — were killed in the weeks following a grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who killed ERIC GARNER. The White House dispatched Biden to the funeral of one of the officers. “The president was with [first lady] Michelle [Obama] and his daughters on their annual holiday trip to Hawaii, where he had grown up, and the staff deemed it unwise for him to take an eleven-hour flight straight into a major controversy,” Biden wrote in his book “Promise Me, Dad.” Biden wrote that the “city felt like it was on a hair trigger” but he felt confident in his ability to navigate it. He also acknowledged the tricky politics of the issue, writing that, “I had been around long enough to know that good policy was always necessary but rarely sufficient.” Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you PAIGE HILL? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: westwingtips@politico.com. Or if you want to stay really anonymous send us a tip through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram, or Whatsapp here. | 
