Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks on Tax Cuts and Empowering Law Enforcement, Sep. 24, 2025
September 24, 2025 · The White House · 0:43:56
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What happened
Vice President JD Vance spoke to law enforcement officers in an aircraft hangar in Concord, North Carolina, on September 24, 2025, joined by Senator Ted Budd and Senate candidate Michael Whatley. The remarks were built around a single argument: “being pro-law and order is actually not that difficult. It’s just a question of political willpower.” He said officers who arrest a violent criminal should see that person “keep them locked up instead of letting them back on our streets with a slap on the wrist,” promised officers “the very best equipment and the very protection anywhere in the world,” and called for enhanced sentences for violent criminals and penalties for jurisdictions that restrict police work.
Vance pointed to the Charlotte light-rail murder of Iryna Zarutska, the 22-year-old Ukrainian refugee whose accused killer, he said, had been arrested 14 times: “Law enforcement did their job. It’s time for you to do your job,” he said of former Governor Roy Cooper’s response. He praised the National Guard surges he said produced two weeks without a murder in Washington, D.C., and had just extended to Memphis, and he memorialized Charlie Kirk, assassinated two weeks earlier. Of the shooting at a Dallas ICE facility that morning, which he described as a politically motivated attack by a “violent left wing extremist,” Vance said: “if your political rhetoric encourages violence against our law enforcement, you can go straight to hell and you have no place in the conversation of the United States of America,” and he called on Democrats to “stop attacking our law enforcement as the Gestapo.”
In questions from North Carolina reporters afterward, Vance said the metrics for sending federal resources into a city are a willing local partnership and the level of violent crime, and invited Charlotte’s mayor to ask. He urged Governor Josh Stein to sign “Iryna’s Law,” the state bill he said ends cashless bail and makes it “harder for some of these local magistrates to let people out with a slap on the wrist.” On Ukraine, he said the President “is growing incredibly impatient with the Russians” and that the position was not a shift but “an acknowledgement of the reality on the ground.” On free speech and the Jimmy Kimmel suspension, he said the administration had taken “zero” government action against any broadcaster. On Hurricane Helene recovery, he said the Secretary of Homeland Security had put “another, I believe, $64 million into the disaster relief effort” in the past week, as he stated the figure.
Why it matters
The Concord remarks are the Vice President’s fullest law-and-order address of 2025 — delivered in the state where the Zarutska murder had just reshaped the bail debate, on the day of the Dallas ICE shooting — and they set out the administration’s standing offer, in his words, to send federal help to any city whose local leaders ask for it.
Scoreboard watch
Scoreboard candidates: Vance’s September 24, 2025 statements urging the signing of Iryna’s Law in North Carolina and the roughly $64 million in additional Helene disaster relief he attributed to the Secretary of Homeland Security that week — each as stated in Concord, to be checked against the bill’s fate and FEMA obligation records. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.
Sources: The White House, “Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks on Tax Cuts and Empowering Law Enforcement” (official upload, embedded above; Concord, NC). Remarks and figures as delivered at the event and in the press question period that followed.
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