Trump urges ban on chokeholds
Police forces will get more federal funding if they instruct officers not to use chokeholds, United States President Donald Trump announced yesterday as he tried to seize control of the debate on police reform.
Flanked by police chiefs in the White House’s rose garden, Trump offered some olive branches to Americans demanding significant reform, while rebuking ‘‘radical and dangerous’’ calls to defund the police.
Speaking after meeting the families of people who died ‘‘in deadly interactions with the police’’, he said that the government would set up a system of incentives to encourage police departments to curb the use of force.
Forces that train officers to minimise the use of violence will be entitled to extra federal grants.
A requirement will be that they ban the use of chokeholds, unless an officer’s life is in danger.
‘‘Everybody said it’s time: we have to do it,’’ Trump said.
The executive order will also create a national registry to track police officers accused of using excessive force so that they cannot relocate without their new force being aware of their past conduct.
The relatively modest order was intended in part as a signal to Congress that the president is open to significant reform. Yet Trump also used the event to reassert his credentials as a ‘‘law and order’’ president.
‘‘I strongly oppose the radical and dangerous efforts to defund, dismantle and dissolve our police departments,’’ he said.
‘‘Americans know the truth: without police there is chaos. Without law there is anarchy. And without safety there is catastrophe.’’
On the contrary, he said, police forces needed more money.
‘‘In many cases local law enforcement is underfunded, understaffed and undersupported,’’ he said. ‘‘Forty-seven per cent of all murders in Chicago and 68 per cent of all murders in Baltimore went without arrests last year. Americans want law and order. They demand law and order.’’
Trump conceded that there were some ‘‘bad’’ officers, but insisted that the number was ‘‘very tiny’’ and criticised former president Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Obama’s vice-president who is the Democrat candidate in November’s election. Trump claimed that they had ‘‘never even tried’’ to reform the police.
The order came amid criticism of Biden from the Democratic Party’s Left flank for his response to the protests. More than 50 groups signed an open letter saying that Biden’s proposed police reforms, which include a legislative federal ban on chokeholds, are ‘‘far from sufficient’’.
LaTosha Brown, the head of Black Voters Matter, a civil rights group that signed the letter, said that Biden’s support for a $300 million boost to community policing programmes was ‘‘a slap in the face to black folks’’. – The Times, London