Democrats unveil ambitious plan for police reform: 'This is a first step'

Democrats in Congress have unveiled a sweeping new set of proposals aimed at reforming policing and transforming law enforcement across the country.

The new legislation, called the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, comes during ongoing mass protests across the country in response to the death of George Floyd while under police custody, and is the most ambitious change to law enforcement sought by Congress in years.

“We cannot settle for anything less than transformative structural change,” said the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in Congress, drawing on the nation’s history of slavery.

Before unveiling the package, House and Senate Democrats including Chuck Schumer, Congressman Jim Clyburn, Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester, Senator Kamala Harris and Senator Cory Booker, held a moment of silence at the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall, reading the names of Floyd and others killed during police interactions.

They wore kente cloths handed out by the Congressional Black Caucus and knelt for eight minutes and 46 seconds, now a symbol of police brutality and violence – it is the length of time prosecutors say Floyd was pinned under a white police officer’s knee before he died.

Representative Karen Bass, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, which is leading the effort, called it bold and transformative.

“The world is witnessing the birth of a new movement in this country,” Bass said.

“A profession where you have the power to kill should be a profession where you have highly trained officers that are accountable to the public,” she added.

The legislation would ban chokeholds by police, including the one used for Floyd, set up a national database for tracking police misconduct and would bar types of “no-knock” warrants, according to an early draft.

The bill also aims to make it easier to pursue legal damages when police violate civil rights, stop racial profiling and racial bias in policing, and limit the transfer of military hardware to police forces.

However, the package stops short of fulfilling calls by leading activists to defund the police, a push to dismantle or reduce financial resources to police departments that has struck new intensity in the weeks of protests since Floyd’s death.

In Minnesota on Sunday, Minneapolis city council members voted to disband the police force there and rethink how it handles emergency response, with a focus on community and social services.

“This is a first step. There is more to come,” said Pelosi. “Once the House passes the Justice and Policing Act [Senate majority leader Mitch] McConnell will, hopefully, take it up. During the Congress, the president must not stand in the way of justice, the Congress and the country will not relent until this legislation is made into law.”

The presumed Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, who will visit Floyd’s family in Houston, Texas, has backed a ban on chokeholds and other elements of the package. On Monday, his campaign issued a statement saying that though he “shares the deep grief and frustration of those calling out for change” he “does not believe that police should be defunded”.

However, the bill’s path to becoming law is likely to be precarious, and has to go through the Republican-controlled Senate. It is unclear if law enforcement and the powerful police unions will back any of the proposed changes or if congressional Republicans will join the effort.

Throughout the press conference on Monday, the Democratic lawmakers vowed to fight for its passage – a subtle concession that the proposal may actually stall somewhere in the legislative process.

“This has never been done before. At the federal level in the Senate Democrats are going to fight like hell to make this a reality,” Schumer said. He added that “now we must collectively, all Americans, raise our voices and call on Leader McConnell, to put this reform bill on the floor of the Senate before July, to be debated and voted on”.

A far less controversial bill that would explicitly make lynching a federal crime for the first time in US history stalled just last week.

The Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act is named after the 14-year-old black boy who was tortured and killed in 1955 in Mississippi, whose death helped spark the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Though the bill passed overwhelmingly in the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives earlier this year, one Republican senator has succeeded in blocking its path.

Republicans responded to the bill by arguing it was a move to effectively defund police everywhere. The National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee both sent out statements saying Democrats wanted to defund police departments. 

“What once lived on the liberal fringe has now broken through in serious way,” said the NRSC communications director, Jesse Hunt. “Senate Democrats everywhere are going to have to answer to voters about how they plan to keep Americans safe while their party seeks to ‘defund the police’.”

Brad Parscale, Donald Trump’s re-election campaign manager, weighed in on Twitter, claiming: “Democrats like Joe Biden want to defund the police. Then, they call Americans ‘privileged’ for worrying about safety. There’s nothing privileged about wanting to protect your family. President Trump will always fight for law and order.”

Trump himself tweeted out “LAW & ORDER, NOT DEFUND AND ABOLISH THE POLICE. The Radical Left Democrats have gone Crazy!” It’s not clear if he was referring to the specific bill. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report