In Washington, Democrats killed efforts at bipartisan police reform when Senate Democrats filibustered a bill proposed by Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), refusing to allow it to be debated on the floor.
McCarthy: We’ll Invest $1.75 Billion in Police Reform
On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) laid out the House GOP’s Commitment to America and said that on policing, they will invest $1.75 billion “for police training, community policing, teaching them when to use their weapon and what type of weapon to use.” And an additional 500,000 body cameras. McCarthy also accused Democrats of wanting to defund the police and stated, “We saw what happened on the streets of L.A.”
McCarthy said, “We’re not going to defund the police. We’re actually going to add $1.75 billion for police training, community policing, teaching them when to use their weapon and what type of weapon to use. But more importantly, we’re going to add 500,000 body cameras.”
He added that the GOP’s agenda will “reunite this nation once and for all. Because if you compare that to what the Democrats are doing, they want to defund the police. They say it, and we saw what happened on the streets of L.A. They want to dismantle this nation. They have wasted their majority.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
HERE IS THE TRUTH
ON COP REFORM!
it's never gonna happen!
California Democrats
Fail to Pass Major Police Reforms, Adjourn
3 Sep 2020196
2:18
California Democrats failed to pass any major police reforms
before the end of the legislative session despite having supermajorities in
both houses of the state legislature, adjourning early Tuesday morning with
little to show.
The San
Francisco Chronicle reported:
Legislators did not advance a spate of policing bills introduced
following nationwide protests over racial inequality after the death of George
Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
The most far-reaching proposal, SB731 by Sen. Steven Bradford,
D-Gardena (Los Angeles County), sought to strip badges from police officers who
break the law and eliminate their legal immunity for killing a suspect.
…
A separate measure to open up investigative records about police
misconduct, SB776 by Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, also died when the Senate
adjourned without giving it final approval. The bill would have made public the records for complaints of
excessive force, sexual assault, dishonesty on the job, discrimination or
wrongful arrests and searches.
The Chronicle blamed
“tensions” among legislators, as well as the difficulty of operating during the
coronavirus. Laurel Rosenhall of CalMatters.org wrote that
“even as the nation roiled after a Minneapolis police officer killed George
Floyd — and lawmakers introduced several bills in response — advocacy inside
the statehouse largely withered. Activists filled the streets but couldn’t fill
the Capitol.”
In Washington, Democrats killed efforts at bipartisan police
reform when Senate Democrats filibustered a bill proposed by Sen. Tim Scott
(R-SC), refusing to allow it to be debated on the floor.
Joel B.
Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the
host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10
p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED
NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary
from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak
Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
The Window for Major Police Reform Might Be Closing
Protesters in New York. Photo: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
New polling
from Gallup shows that the American public has less confidence in the
police than at any point in the last three decades, the entire time the
organization has been tracking views on the subject. This seems like good news
for reformers, and abolitionists in particular. But a yawning racial gap in the
Gallup poll, ideological quirks that appear in other surveys, congressional
gridlock, and Republicans’ increased use of law enforcement as a wedge issue all bode poorly for major change. Piecemeal implementation
of policing reduction efforts, meanwhile, seems bound to leave a sour taste in
people’s mouths regarding the burgeoning “defund” movement. And the pitched
atmosphere generated by President Trump’s authoritarian antics — and his
bungling of the pandemic response — has an expiration date, whether it’s a few
months or a few years from now.
In short, the outlook
for any reforms beyond several that have mostly been tried in the past
— and failed to measurably reduce police violence nationwide — is less
encouraging than in recent weeks, and there are signs that it will deteriorate
further. Gallup’s 2020 survey of faith in American institutions aptly distills
the mood of the last two months, which has at times bordered on
insurrectionary. Since the pollster began collecting data on the subject in
1993, the share of Americans who’ve expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot”
of confidence in the police has hovered between 52 and 64 percent. This year,
it dropped to 48 percent — the lowest total yet recorded, and the first
time it’s fallen below the level of a majority. The numbers are even starker
when accounting for race. Confidence among Black adults has always been
significantly lower than for white adults, with a high of 37 percent. But
this year’s measure of 19 percent marks an all-time nadir, and boasts the widest
racial gap in confidence (37 points) ever measured by Gallup on this
topic.
This shift is
attributable to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25.
Nationwide protests, intermittent rioting, and often-vicious police crackdowns
have drawn ever-greater numbers of Americans into the streets, while prompting
many more to reassess the merits of racist and unaccountable law enforcement.
For a time, this reassessment seemed to be transpartisan. Six years after the
Black Lives Matter movement’s onset highlighted partisan rifts — and became a
focal point of the Republican National Convention in 2016 — almost half of
Republicans today think the criminal-legal system needs either “major changes”
or “a complete overhaul,” according to a recent Associated Press–NORC Center
for Public Affairs Research poll. Lawmakers initially responded accordingly. Republicans and
Democrats in Congress each submitted reform bills; President Trump issued
an executive order conceding that some officers have “misused their authority,”
and called for better training, credentialing, and reporting of abusive police.
Most Americans support bans on choke holds and no-knock warrants, duty-to-intervene
standards for officers who see others using excessive force, and requiring the
use of body cameras. At times, their sympathies have verged on radical: A
Monmouth University poll conducted in late May and early June found that 54 percent
of Americans thought the torching of Minneapolis’s Third Police Precinct by
rioters was at least partially justified.
One might intuit that
a public so open to this brand of destruction would hold revolutionary views on
what should be done about policing. But more often, surveys uncover a more
complicated set of beliefs. Polling conducted by Morning Consult around the same time found that 58 percent of Americans
supported dispatching the military to U.S. cities to quell unrest. Marist pollsters found that a combined 56 percent felt the
nationwide police response — which, to that point, had included brutal
assaults and mass deployment of tear gas by agencies like the NYPD — was
either “mostly appropriate” or not aggressive enough. Their taste in reforms
has been accordingly milquetoast. With the notable exception of outlawing
“qualified immunity,” which protects officers from being held personally
liable for constitutional violations, the policy changes supported by wide
majorities of Americans are already in place in many departments, and to little
avail. Among the most popular — body cameras — have no measurable
impact on rates of police violence. Choke holds were banned in New York when
one was used to kill Eric Garner in 2014; officers were obligated to intervene
in Minneapolis when they saw Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, and
yet they did not. In some places, this dissonance has failed to sway even those
who recognize it. After Rayshard Brooks was killed in June, Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance
Bottoms announced a plan to better train
police officers in the same speech where she admitted that existing training
programs had failed.
Meanwhile, more
radical reforms have not found popular purchase. Despite the increased
prevalence of cries to “defund” or “abolish” the police, neither proposal has even close
to majority support. Nor have most officials who’ve
rushed headlong to embrace their spirit done so holistically, as most abolitionists
envision. Abolition calls for a reorientation of society toward robust
investments in housing, health care, employment, and anti-poverty
measures, framed by a new infrastructure for resolving harm. Instead,
politicians heeding its slogans have simply withdrawn the police from duty.
According to the New York Times, the CHOP zone in Seattle saw
several acts of violence against which victims found no protective
infrastructure. That police had been prohibited from venturing inside by city
officials bodes poorly for a movement that, while meritorious, has plenty of
hearts and minds left to win over — including the majority of Black
Americans, many whose experience with government neglect, including from police
they call for help, holds strong associations with rampant shootings,
robberies, and assaults in their communities. This remains so even as most
black people plainly don’t trust officers and consider them racist. Experiments
like that proposed in Minneapolis — where the city council recently voted
to disband the police department and reenvision public safety — would be
wise to reckon with this legacy in its totality, rather than offering piecemeal
concessions to what they think are abolitionist demands.
The national picture
is even less heartening. Congressional talks have since imploded, and a
policing-reform deal seems to be off the table. As rioting resumed in Portland
and gripped Chicago’s Miracle Mile over the weekend, the president and his
allies continued their timeworn tack of demagoguing protest, which has been
their main strategy since late June and their default for much longer. Trump
has cast the unrest as bedlam caused by Democratic leaders — even as bad
policing sparked it and his deployment of federal troops to Portland escalated it. His surrogates on Fox News and
others like Rudy Giuliani have gone back
to characterizing Black Lives Matter activists as part of a terrorist hate
group. One of Trump’s main lines of attack against Joe Biden is the false claim
that his Democratic rival wants to abolish the police.
The future remains
uncertain, but broadly speaking, the reformist sentiment that seemed
transpartisan and was enthusiastically supported by the majority earlier this
summer has regressed to a site of partisan bickering, muddled by the
ideological inconsistencies of a public whose abstract sympathies often clash
with its preferred realities. And hope for structural change that reckons with
the more banal violence of policing — as opposed to its more extreme
forms, like on-camera killings — rests with localities whose proposed
changes, in many cases, have either echoed failed efforts past or engaged in
piecemeal abolition that’s left potential allies skeptical. There are other
complicating factors at play. In the likely event that the unrest is fueled by
antipathy toward Trump — on whose watch hundreds of thousands of people
have died from COVID-19, and millions have lost work — protest energy
seems bound to flag further once he leaves office, which could credibly happen
in January. Absent changes to these trends, the opportunity for major reform
seems increasingly tenuous. Even at this historic moment, eroded trust in the
police could be greeted with yet another thwarted effort to change them.
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