A newly surfaced 2020 phone call has put Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on the defensive over past comments on policing, according to a CNN KFile report published Monday.
The call, made while Talarico was a state representative, was with Texas Rising, a progressive organizing group that was openly calling to defund police departments as nationwide protests followed the death of George Floyd. On that call, Talarico argued the slogan’s status as politically off-limits was hypocritical given other state budget decisions.
As an educator, it’s always rich to me that ‘defund the police’ is considered off-limits in our political debate, when defunding health services, defunding public education has been the stated policy of our state government for decades now.
Talarico acknowledged that the hashtag was “getting people all riled up” in his swing district at the time, but said he believed voters understood that armed officers shouldn’t be the ones responding to minor traffic accidents or mental-health crises.
His Senate campaign has pushed back hard on the resurfaced remarks, calling it a “flat-out lie” that Talarico ever supported defunding police and pointing to votes he cast directing billions of dollars to local law enforcement agencies.
James did not call for and does not support defunding the police, and he strongly supports Texas law enforcement and first responders.
That denial, attributed to campaign spokesperson JT Ennis, sits alongside a broader record CNN says complicates the picture. The network reported that from 2019 through at least 2022, Talarico repeatedly called for limiting police power and redirecting funds toward community-based alternatives.
In Austin, following the release of footage related to the death of Javier Ambler II, Talarico said in 2020 that the policing system was “deeply broken” and needed to be replaced “with something new and something better.” His campaign told CNN that remark was “taken out of context” and was actually a reference to reality television shows about policing.
At a 2022 graduation ceremony for incarcerated students, Talarico again linked reduced spending on police and prisons to increased investment in social programs, saying: “If we took just half of what we spent on wars, prisons, and policing, and spent it on education, health care, and jobs, we could make prisons obsolete.”
The report lands as Talarico has worked to soften his public image ahead of the general election, saying many of his 2020 comments “missed the mark.” In an undercover video released last month, he pledged to use a Senate seat to fight for transgender children.
Talarico is running against Republican incumbent Ken Paxton in a race that polling shows as a dead heat.
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