House and Senate Democrats introduced a sweeping police reform bill that would create a national reporting database and a ban on police use of the chokehold maneuver.
“It is time for this,” Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat, said Monday.
Democrats unveiled the Justice in Policing Act after kneeling in a moment of silence for nearly nine minutes to memorialize the death of George Floyd.
Floyd, a black man, died in police custody after a white officer knelt on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. The House bill would call for states to ban police from using the chokehold or any maneuver that places pressure on a person’s neck and restricts breathing. It would ban the use of chokeholds by federal law enforcement and condition federal law enforcement funding for states on their banning the chokehold.
“The chokehold and other police tactic such as a knee to the neck, which cut off breathing and results in asphyxiation is a procedure that is unnecessary, unacceptable, uncivilized, unconscionable and un-American,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat and chairman of the Democratic Caucus who first introduced the measure in 2015. “This legislation would make it unlawful under our nation’s civil rights laws.”
The measure would also require independent investigation and independent prosecution when police misuse deadly force and require a report to be filed with the state’s attorney general.
The measure would also change qualified immunity for police, making them accountable for deaths that occur by “knowingly or reckless disregard” for a person’s safety.
“This is a transformational piece of legislation,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said. “This is an important day.”
The measure would establish a national police misconduct registry, a measure that is similar to one introduced in the Senate by the GOP’s only black senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina.
Scott has drafted the Walter Scott Notification Act, which would compel states to track and record the details, including race, of every police shooting. States that failed to track and report the data would lose federal funding.
He first introduced the measure in 2015. It’s named for Walter Scott, an unarmed black man shot to death by a white police officer after a traffic stop.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, a top GOP lawmaker and former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is a co-sponsor along with fellow Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, who is a member of the Republican leadership, and Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma.
House Democrats said they were planning additional measures that respond to the death of Floyd and other African Americans as well as the resulting civil unrest that has swept cities across the United States.
“We do have other legislation along the lines of jobs and justice, that gets at other issues in the community,” Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Karen Bass, a California Democrat, said.
The House Judiciary Committee plans to advance the police reform measure in the coming weeks, Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said Monday.
