One year has gone by since former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his back and neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Floyd pleaded “Mama! Mama!” and eventually fell silent, while horrified onlookers watched and recorded on their phones. Those videos allowed the whole world to see the agony, the excruciating cruelty, of a Black man slowly having the life crushed out of his body.
Last month a jury correctly convicted Chauvin for Floyd’s murder, meting out welcome justice.
But just like the “Black Lives Matter” slogan painted in huge yellow letters on Fifth Avenue in New York last summer, hopes that Congress will enact larger, federal reforms to policing, reforms that could prevent more people from dying the way Floyd did, are fading, falling victim to time, and inertia.
Fault for the stalling of federal reform lies with politicians of both parties. Congressional Democrats struck the first blow to reform’s momentum when, a month after Floyd’s death, they blocked Republicans’ imperfect but still good legislation, called the Justice Act. The bill, sponsored by GOP Sen. Tim Scott, would have made lynching a federal hate crime, authorized a commission to study police uses of force, withheld federal grants from local police departments that failed to ban choke holds and outfit officers with body cameras, and would have required the Justice Department be notified whenever “no-knock” warrants, deployed in the tragic death of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, are used.
While Republicans no longer hold the Senate majority or the presidency, their votes are still required to enact any change at the federal level. Democrats’ own bill, the Justice in Policing Act, has much in common with Scott’s Justice Act. Democrats should follow the example set by more than two dozen states’ legislatures and make a compromise. Since Floyd’s murder, some 25 states and Washington, D.C., have enacted legislative changes to their laws governing police use of force, officers’ duty to intervene in cases of police misconduct, and to statewide policies for reporting badly-behaving cops.
By themselves, those state reforms may seem like incremental changes. Added together, they mean progress.
— New York Daily News
