NJ Dem House candidate Sue Altman flip-flops on police and public safety in resurfaced social media posts
New Jersey House Democratic candidate Sue Altman has disavowed several anti-law enforcement policies — including the “Defund the Police” movement — that she backed in past social media posts.The former boss of the Garden State’s progressive Working Families Party has modified her past stances, telling NJ Spotlight News in an interview last week that she is “not in favor of defund the police.”“I think it was a really silly hashtag from the middle of the pandemic that caught fire online,” she said.“I believe in a comprehensive vision for public safety that includes all stakeholders.”But as her campaign to unseat Republican Rep.
Tom Kean in New Jersey’s 7th District was heating up last fall, a Democratic campaign operative tweeted out a screenshot showing she supported defunding the police — a post that has since been deleted.“NJ’s Sheriffs … are overwhelmingly white and male, snuggled in w[ith] our massive county government, and control HUGE budgets,” Altman posted on Twitter, now X.“Those of us working on #DefundThePolice in Jersey might consider looking here,” she added.The screenshot did not include a date, but the profile image matches Altman’s Twitter profile photo between 2019 and 2021, according to archived posts from her account.Another post from the operative, Checkmate Advisors President Steve Ayscue, called Altman out for celebrating the release from prison of a convicted cop killer.In July 2020, she said it was “awesome” that the Working Families Party was pushing to “fight to shift resources from policing to real community investments instead.”Other posts from the same period before Altman’s run for office criticized the alleged “extra perks” available to “white male dominated professions like cops [a]n[d] firefighters.”She also encouraged others to attend a “police reform rally” in June 2021 organized by a left-wing activist who supports reparations payments for black Americans, a policy for ...