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What Republicans and Democrats are proposing to reform the police

by Sarah Westwood  

 

April 22, 2021 06:30 AM

In the wake of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s conviction for the murder of George Floyd, Democrats and some Republicans are renewing police reform efforts that stalled ahead of the 2020 election.

President Joe Biden faces fresh pressure to prioritize police reforms, which include changing the kinds of force officers are permitted to use in the field and eliminating some of the legal protections officers have in case they make a mistake in the line of duty.

The debate has in the past gotten contentious, with Republicans accusing Democrats of jeopardizing public safety by defanging law enforcement and Democrats arguing Republicans want to protect a fundamentally racist institution.

Here are some of the police reforms that lawmakers and activists have floated.

DEMOCRATS’ PROPOSAL

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act would encourage national standards for state and local police offices across the country by tying federal grants to compliance with the new rules, which include a ban on chokeholds and no-knock warrants.

The bill would raise the standard for law enforcement use of force from “reasonable” to “necessary” and strip police officers from some of the protections they now enjoy in court.

One of those protections, “qualified immunity,” is at the center of the police reform debate.

Qualified immunity shields police officers from civil liability for missteps made in the “reasonable” course of doing their jobs. While it doesn’t protect against criminal violations of the law committed on the job — it did not apply to Chauvin, for example — it can stop police officers from facing lawsuits over their conduct.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act would end qualified immunity. And in criminal proceedings, the bill would lower the federal standard for when police can face charges from officers demonstrating “willfulness” in their misconduct to officers demonstrating “recklessness.”

House Democrats passed the bill in March, but it will have a difficult road through the evenly split Senate.

REPUBLICANS’ PROPOSAL

Republican Sen. Tim Scott led the GOP’s police reform effort last year, introducing a bill in June 2020 that Democrats blocked with a filibuster.

Scott’s bill, the Just and Unifying Solutions to Invigorate Communities Everywhere Act, or JUSTICE Act, addressed some of the same issues that Democrats targeted with the George Floyd Act — but proposed less severe remedies.

For example, the bill would not bar police from using chokeholds or withhold funds from offices that still allow them. Instead, the bill would require state and local police offices to “put in place tough policies severely restricting the use of chokeholds, except in situations where deadly force is authorized.”

Scott’s bill would still allow for no-knock warrants but would ask police offices to report to the attorney general details about every instance in which these warrants are used, such as the reasons why and the force used.

No-knock warrants became a focal point of police reform after the police killing of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old paramedic in Louisville who died after officers executed a no-knock search warrant on her apartment. Police fatally shot Taylor in March 2020 after her boyfriend, who was in her apartment, fired a warning shot at police because he said the officers had not announced themselves as law enforcement as they entered and he had thought they were intruders.

The JUSTICE Act called for the development of a new training curriculum for police officers and would set aside $20 million per year until 2025 to help agencies come up with the new training techniques. The training would focus on finding alternatives to the use of force, as well as new de-escalation techniques.

Democrats criticized the Scott proposal last year as insufficient, however.

DEFUND THE POLICE

More radical overhauls of policing have largely fallen under the umbrella of the “defund the police” movement, which gained steam during protests over Floyd’s death last summer.

Some liberals have argued systemic racism is too deeply embedded in the existing structure of law enforcement agencies and, therefore, cannot be rooted out by reform alone. Lawmakers who support this movement, such as Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, say troubled police departments should be dismantled and their funding redirected toward community-focused solutions.

“It’s not a slogan but a policy demand,” Omar said in December.

Some liberal cities have heeded the call by slashing their police budgets. Seattle, for example, cut its police budget by 20% in December and funneled some of that money into community groups.

Minneapolis, whose police department came under intense scrutiny after Floyd’s death, repurposed roughly $8 million from its police budget for things such as mental health services and other programs.

Republicans successfully turned the protest rallying cry into a line of attack ahead of the 2020 election, however, and many Democrats have sought to distance themselves from the idea of cutting funding from police altogether.

‘8 CAN’T WAIT’

As protests swept through cities in the wake of Floyd’s death last year, a social media campaign offering eight ideas for reforming police swept through Instagram feeds across the country. The #8CantWait campaign caught the attention of celebrities like Ariana Grande and trended across multiple social media platforms as people shared the seemingly simple remedies for fixing policing in America.

Campaign Zero, a police reform group formed in 2015, started the 8 Can’t Wait campaign in June to promote concrete policy changes when energy around the topic was high.

The eight reforms included a ban on chokeholds, among the most popular of proposed reforms from all sides.

Another was a requirement that officers attempt de-escalation in an effort to avoid needing to use force at all. Requiring a verbal warning before shooting, requiring officers to exhaust all other options before using lethal force, and requiring officers to intervene if they see a colleague using excessive force were also included on the list, which supporters shared in a slick graphic on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Some liberals attacked the campaign, however, because they said it oversimplified the complex issue of police reform and put forward small changes that would not address the deeper problems driving police brutality.

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