Invest to Protect Act of 2022

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. RUTHERFORD. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this bill.

I was very fortunate during my 40-year law enforcement career to work for a large and growing law enforcement agency. We had the resources to go after Federal grants to help keep our community safe, to bring those Federal dollars back home to protect my community.

I know that many agencies that I worked with did not have that benefit, and that is why, on many of the projects that came from Federal participation, we often partnered with much smaller agencies to help them out.

This bill is all about helping those agencies with 125 officers or less to be able to access those Federal grants that they cannot access right now for training, retention, and hiring. That is what we should be doing, Mr. Speaker.

That is why I worked with my good friend across the aisle, Josh Gottheimer. I appreciate him working on this, getting to the language that we could all agree with. It has been back and forth quite a bit, but we got it here to the floor, and I congratulate him on that.

This is a bipartisan issue. This is for our law enforcement men and women. These are for those small agencies. We need to be able to help them out.

I can tell you the last 2\1/2\ years have left law enforcement demoralized like never before. I have seen it. They need this assistance as they have officers that are leaving in droves.

I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to come together and vote for this bill, which is going to help small law enforcement agencies join with the National Fraternal Order of Police, which supports this bill, and other law enforcement organizations. NAPO is another.

Mr. Speaker, I encourage everyone to vote ``yes'' on this bill. I believe these small law enforcement agencies absolutely need our assistance.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source