WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats unveiled a sweeping police reform package on Monday, seeking to end police brutality against Black people. But while the bill includes a bevy of major reforms, it doesn’t go as far some Black Lives Matter activists would like to see.
The bill would make substantial reforms to federal law enforcement regulations. It would require body and dashboard cameras, ban choke holds, end no-knock warrants in drug cases, make lynching a federal hate crime, curtail the federal government’s support in giving military-grade tools to police departments, and make it easier to pursue criminal and civil penalties against police misconduct.
But the bill doesn’t push to defund or disband police departments, a core push from some Black Lives Matter groups that has begun to gain traction in some cities amidst widespread protests following the police killing of George Floyd.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and a number of other prominent Democrats presaged the bill’s introduction by kneeling for 8 minutes and 46 seconds — a lengthy moment of silence marking amount of time a police officer kneeled on Floyd’s neck as he slowly died on May 25.
“This moment of national anguish is being transformed into a movement of national action,” Pelosi said as she unveiled the Justice in Policing Act of 2020.
The legislation comes at an inflection point — Americans’ views of racially discriminatory policing have shifted rapidly in the past few years in the wake of a string of highly publicized police killings of unarmed Black people.
As recently as 2016, polling found that only one third of Americans said police were more likely to subject Black people to excessive force. But a Monmouth University poll from last week showed that 57% to 33% of Americans said that police are more likely to use excessive force on Black people. Fully 78% said the anger that led to the recent protests after the police killing of George Floyd is at least partially justified. And an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday found that by a two to one margin, Americans are more troubled by the actions of police in the killing of George Floyd than by violence that has flared at some protests.
That puts a lot of pressure on Republicans to act — and President Trump’s harsh approach to protestors in the past week appears to be hurting, not helping, his reelection chances, as he’s fallen even further behind former Vice President Joe Biden in recent polls.
But it remains unclear how far Americans will be willing to go to reform police departments. And Democrats face some political risk on this topic, even as public opinion seems to be rapidly moving in in the direction of police reform. President Trump has hammered hard on “law and order,” and is seeking to tie Democrats to the most hardline calls to abolish policing:
Democrats from Vice President Joe Biden on down will have to navigate the challenge of hearing and respond to their base, while avoiding alienating the more moderate, suburban white voters they need to win in 2020.
Democrats danced around the issue of defunding police departments at their press conference, with some saying they saw some merits in the idea even as they made clear they weren't endorsing it.
Pelosi said Americans should “have those debates at the local level.”
“We could rebalance some of our funding to address more of these issues more directly,” Pelosi said. “But this isn’t about that.”
Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), the head of the Congressional Black Caucus, responded by pointing out the bill offered no new money for police, and included grants to communities “that begin to reenvision” what policing might look like in particular neighborhoods.
Police reform is already moving at the local level. Minneapolis’s city council took a dramatic step on Sunday, announcing they would disband the city’s police department. And the mayors of New York and Los Angeles have pledged to cut funds currently allotted to police departments and rebudget them towards social programs aimed at helping nonwhite communities.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), one of the bill’s chief Senate sponsors, alluded to calls for cities and states to defund police programs and reapportion that money towards other programs that can help poorer and nonwhite communities.
“We have confused safe communities with hiring more cops on the street,” she said, pointing out that much reform would have to be undertaken at the local and state level. “Our bill addresses a very specific matter under a larger umbrella of issues that must be addressed.”
And Harris pointed out that “Many in America right now already live in places with minimal police presence” — they’re just middle- and upper-class areas.
Cover: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other Democratic lawmakers take a knee to observe a moment of silence on Capitol Hill for George Floyd and other victims of police brutality June 8, 2020, in Washington, DC. (Photo: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
from VICE https://ift.tt/2MHg8Fy
via cheap web hosting
No comments:
Post a Comment