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On Monday members of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, unveiled a sweeping reform bill aimed at overhauling policing in the United States.
The bill titled, “Justice in Policing Act,” would ban chokeholds, much like the one used on George Floyd and Eric Garner, resulting in his death and would also bar no-knock warrants which led to the death of Breonna Taylor, who was senselessly shot eight times after officers broke into her apartment looking for narcotics, NBC News reports.
At a time when racial tensions are at a high and protests continue due to the back-to-back murders of Floyd, Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, as well as the horrific deaths and assaults in the Black trans community of Nina Pop, Tony McDade and Iyanna Dior, congressional leaders are finally heading the call of the very people who voted them into office.
The bill was co-written by Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Karen Bass, (D-CA) House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, (D-NY), and Sens. Kamala Harris, (D-CA) and Cory Booker, (D-NJ), both who recently ended their bids for president in the 2020 race.
The “Justice in Policing Act” would also require police departments to track and send data when lethal force is used and will allocate funds through a grant program to state attorney generals who will create an independent investigative task force to intervene. The argument for excessive force has been the lethal determining factor in why officers are rarely imprisoned after their involvement in deadly police-involved cases.
The legislation will also involve tracking officers with past infractions, preventing them from being able to move freely to other policing jurisdictions. It will also examine how law enforcement officers are trained and provide exemplary action to eliminate racial profiling and will overhaul the use of excessive force, including the use of body cameras and mandatory dashboard cameras.
Legislators are also examining local law enforcement’s access to military weapons, and hope to limit military-grade weapons in the bill.
“The time for change is NOW,” the official CBC’s page shared on Twitter. “Led by the @TheBlackCaucus, House and Senate Democrats have been working tirelessly to develop bold, historic legislation to: hold police accountable, end police brutality, improve transparency, enact structural changes, protect our communities,” the message concluded.
“The martyrdom of George Floyd gave the American experience a moment of national anguish as we grieve for the black Americans killed by police brutality today,” Pelosi said during Monday’s press conference. “This moment of national anguish is being transformed into a movement of national action as Americans from across the country peacefully protest to demand an end to injustice. Today, with the justice and policing at the Congress is standing with those fighting for justice and taking action.”
In an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of The Union, Bass expressed that the bill has “a lot of support” among House Republicans.
“This bill, I believe, is a bold piece of legislation. It’s transformative,” she said.
However, on social media, the optics proved to be a bit unsettling, as many could not find the correlation between needing to wear cloth and their impact message.
It remains important to give a crucial eye to politicians who routinely defer to pandering in order to appeal to minorities and the undeserved. But political leaders in Washington D.C. are finally taking a look at policing and a federal intervention, much like the surprising overhaul that was recently discussed on a local level in Minneapolis, the city where Floyd’s life was taken.
