As Sen. Tim Scott prepares to give the GOP response to President Joe Biden’s address, the Senate’s only black Republican finds himself integral to a most intense and important debate.
At the furthest ideological ends of the police reform “discussion,” the Left wants to defund and destroy law enforcement. Similarly, many Republicans seem to want stories about police killings to just go away, including far-right “nationalist” conservatives who actively work against the idea that criminal justice or police reform is even needed.
Scott is in the position of understanding how people on both sides of this debate feel because he has lived among them. He has publicly recounted his own encounters with police as a black man. Scott is also a conservative Republican who knows getting rid of police altogether is not only insane but a non-starter for making any progress on this very real problem.
The key to reform it is how to approach the issue of qualified immunity, which protects police officers against lawsuits. To Republicans and people who want law and order, qualified immunity sounds like a necessity because it allows police officers to make inevitable mistakes that come with their job. To Democrats and people of color, it sounds like a free pass to harass or worse.
Reason’s Billy Binion recently outlined a few examples of the latter, “Qualified immunity has thus protected a cop who shot a 10-year-old, two cops who allegedly stole $225,000 while executing a search warrant, a cop who ruined a man’s car during a bogus drug search, two cops who beat and arrested a man for standing outside his own house, and a cop who shot an unarmed 15-year-old, among others.”
As terrible as these examples are, and there are no doubt many more, there are also likely many incidents police officers become involved in in which difficult decisions have to be made in an instant. The recent police shooting of a 16-year-old knife-wielding black girl in Columbus, Ohio, is a good example. If the officer had not shot the person, video of the incident shows the aggressor might have stabbed another woman she was lunging at with said knife. The incident was not in the same universe as former police officer and convicted murderer Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd by kneeling on his neck.
So what to do about qualified immunity? Scott has a compromise: allow alleged victims of police brutality to sue police departments but not individuals. For the first time, victims would have some substantive recourse. Could such legislation find bipartisan compromise? Scott told CNN on April 21 that Democrats “have been as responsive in this recent conversation than they have ever been, in my opinion,” and their discussion is “on the verge of wrapping soon.”
Not only is Scott uniquely situated to find common ground between both parties on this crucial issue, he is one of the very few willing to attempt it. It is one thing to emotionally wallow in the polar opposite Left and Right camps of “defund the police” and “law and order,” it is quite another thing to take heat from both sides in the name of real reform.
Police officers have an experience those of us who have never served in law enforcement can’t begin to understand. Black people also have an experience with law enforcement that many white people can’t begin to understand.
After explaining on the Senate floor in 2016 how he had been pulled over seven times by police in one year — “not four, not five, not six, but seven times … as an elected official” — for “nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood or some other reason just as trivial,” Scott would add, “I do not know many African American men who do not have a very similar story to tell.”
This should not be happening in America, and in trying to actually prevent it, Scott might have the most difficult job of all: He’s trying to lead.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
