Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats introduced the “Justice in Policing Act of 2020” this week, a legislative package full of somewhat modest but significant criminal justice reforms. Unfortunately, as Sen. Mitt Romney noted, the bill has no Republican co-sponsors and little, if any, effort was made to seek Republican input.
It’s clear that the package is largely a partisan agenda statement from Democrats, rather than a serious reform proposal meant to become law. Yet honest observers of all political stripes should still see that many of its provisions have merit.
Most importantly, conservatives should absolutely support the bill’s weakening of “qualified immunity,” a pernicious legal doctrine that provides government officials a near-complete liability shield from civil lawsuits for violating citizens’ constitutional rights. This reform is not a liberal concept: Rep. Justin Amash, a Michigan libertarian with a strong small-government voting record, has introduced a more sweeping bill abolishing qualified immunity in its entirety.
Despite the Trump administration’s stated opposition to qualified immunity reform, protecting government officials from accountability for their actions is inconsistent with conservative desires to “drain the swamp” of unaccountable state bureaucrats. If anything, the Democrats’ bill doesn’t go far enough, as it weakens qualified immunity but doesn’t abolish it, and, inexplicably, only weakens the liability shield for state officials, not federal agents.
The bill also bans “no-knock” warrants in federal drug cases and provides incentives to encourage similar reforms at the state level. This is a reform everyone should support.
“No-knock” warrants are search warrants where police are granted the ability to break into your home without announcing to you that they are the police. This needlessly puts both police officers and civilians in danger, because, as we saw in the tragic killing of Breonna Taylor, law-abiding gun owners might understandably shoot at the unknown intruders invading their home and unknowingly start a deadly firefight with the police.
Ideally, legislators would abolish “no-knock” warrants altogether, but some progress is better than nothing.
Another reform included in the Justice in Policing Act is some limit on the transfer of military-grade equipment to police departments. This is certainly called for. As the Heritage Foundation has detailed, “The Department of Homeland Security has handed out anti-terrorism grants to cities and towns across the country, enabling them to buy armored vehicles, guns, armor, aircraft, and other equipment. Federal agencies of all stripes, as well as local police departments in towns with populations less than 14,000, come equipped with SWAT teams and heavy artillery.”
If recent events and the rise in awareness of police brutality make anything clear, it’s that arming police officers with heavy artillery or giving small-town cops a SWAT team is not just overkill but a recipe for disaster. We clearly can’t entrust such destructive weapons to the same police that have assaulted and arrested journalists covering protests, shoved an elderly protester and left him in a pool of blood, randomly dragged black people out of cars, and committed too many abuses of power in the last few weeks to count.
Sure, there are other more questionable provisions in the Democrats’ bill. And it has notable omissions, such as failing to do anything to rein in police unions, which shield bad cops from accountability. But despite its shortcomings, some of the Democratic police reform bill’s provisions offer a good place for bipartisan reform to start.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and a freelance journalist. He was previously a fellow at the Washington Examiner.
