KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images
- Nationwide protests against racism and police brutality have heightened calls for national police reform.
- Many activists and progressive lawmakers are calling for a national defunding of the police and the redistribution of resources to social services, including education and healthcare.
- Democrats in Congress have crafted a sweeping bill that would boost police accountability and end certain controversial law enforcement tactics. The president is set to sign an executive order implementing some incremental changes.
- Here's what 10 prominent activists, experts, and lawmakers are calling for.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Protests across the country sparked by the May 25 death of George Floyd have heightened calls for national police reform.
Many activists and progressive lawmakers are calling for a national defunding of the police, and the redistribution of resources to social services, including education and healthcare. Some are calling for abolishing police departments altogether and replacing them with other forms of community protection.
House Democrats have put forward the Justice in Policing Act, the most sweeping set of law enforcement reforms proposed by Congress in recent decades, which calls for boosting police accountability and ending certain controversial law enforcement practices like chokeholds and no-knock warrants in drug cases.
While a handful of congressional Republicans have voiced support for incremental reforms like banning chokeholds and mandating the use of body cameras, President Donald Trump has downplayed calls for sweeping change. Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Tim Scott and James Lankford, are reportedly set to unveil their own police reform proposal on Wednesday.
Some states and cities have already passed measures and repealed laws in order to overhaul local policing.
Here's what 10 prominent voices are calling for:
Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza is calling for national defunding of police and the reallocation of resources to social services, including housing and healthcare.
Earl Gibson III/Getty Images
"So much of policing right now is generated and directed towards quality-of-life issues, homelessness, drug addiction, domestic violence," Garza told NBC News.
"What we do need is increased funding for housing, we need increased funding for education, we need increased funding for quality of life of communities who are over-policed and over-surveilled."
House and Senate Democrats are calling to ban chokeholds, end no-knock warrants in federal drug cases, and create a national police misconduct registry.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
House Democrats have put forward the Justice in Policing Act, the most sweeping set of law enforcement reforms proposed by Congress in recent decades. It focuses on increasing police accountability and curbing some of the most harmful police tactics.
The bill would put an end to qualified immunity, which protects law enforcement from civil lawsuits, create a higher federal use of force standard, log a national registry of police misconduct, and ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants.
House leaders have rejected calls to defund police departments.
"We want to work with our police departments," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week. "There are many things we call upon our police departments to deal with — mental health issues, policing in schools and the rest — that we could rebalance some of our funding to address some of those issues more directly. But this isn't about that."
Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Tim Scott, support significantly less far-reaching reforms, which they're preparing to unveil in new legislation this week.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Some of the measures in the GOP reform bill will reportedly be similar to those in the Democratic bill, including a national database of law enforcement misconduct, a ban on neck restraints and no-knock warrants, and lowering the legal bar for civil lawsuits against officers.
But Republicans have rejected other measures proposed by Democrats, including ending qualified immunity, which Scott has called a "poison pill" for the GOP.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
See Also:
- Democratic leaders are rejecting the biggest demand of Black Lives Matter protesters as they push their police reform bill
- A Trump-supporting QAnon conspiracist has a strong chance of winning a congressional seat in Georgia
- Veepstakes contender Amy Klobuchar gets more money from police union PACs than all but one other senator
SEE ALSO: A Trump-supporting QAnon conspiracist has a strong chance of winning a congressional seat in Georgia
from Business Insider https://ift.tt/2N0wdX4
No comments:
Post a Comment