Forum addresses police reform

It was 1973 when U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, a Democrat from Los Angeles, first started being active on the issue of unequal treatment by police.

That was the same year George Floyd was born. The unarmed, handcuffed Black man was killed May 25 while in Minneapolis police custody — an incident which was reverberated around the world.

Now, in the year that he died, Bass is seeing finally seeing national consensus and movement on the issue of police reform. And it took video of his death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer to do it.

“I’ve not seen a moment like this before in my lifetime,” said Bass. “Polls show 70 percent of the

U.S. population believes we have a problem with policing in this country and it is the first time I have ever seen that.”

Since then “we have seen a collective and unified cry across the country, a demand for police reform and it is not just happening in major cities,” said U.S. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-6th Dist., pointing to peaceful protests in her district in West Chester, Paoli and Reading.

“There are moments we are called upon to be leaders, all of us,” said Houlahan. “Police culture in our country needs to change.”

“It is an undeniable fact that that there is systemic racism in our country and has been since its founding,” said Houlahan.

Their comments came during a telephone town hall held hosted by Houlahan, her 24th since being elected, and devoted to the subject of police reform. More than 2,000 people participated.

After the video showing former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin kneeing on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes, protests sprang up not just in the U.S., but around the world.

“It’s a bit of an embarrassment to have people around the world protesting for human rights in the U.S,” said Bass. “There was a time when the U.S. was the one fighting for human rights.”

On June 10, Bass, who is chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, introduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which was co-sponsored by Houlahan and passed the House of Representatives.

It has three major components, Bass said.

Accountability

The bill would make it easier to prosecute and sue police officers who commit crimes. When Chauvin killed Floyd, “he stared into the camera because he knew he would act with impunity,” said Bass.

A bill with the same goal, police reform, has also been sponsored in the Senate, Bass said. She has been in touch with its sponsor, Sen. Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina “and he seems willing to move” on some of the provisions of that bill.

However, Houlahan worries that “there is a lot of daylight” between the House and Senate bills — the most glaring of which is “it lacks an enforcement mechanism,” she said.

For example, Bass said, Scott’s bill would allow the use of chokeholds “if the officer is in fear for their life. The problem is every time an officer kills, they say they are in fear for their life.”

The bill would also create a “registry of officers with a history of abuse. The officer who murdered George Floyd had a history of abuse and maybe a registry would have gotten him fired, or not hired in the first place,” said Bass.

Accreditation and training

The second leg of Bass’s would implement national policing standards.

“Police should be graded like any other profession. The person who cuts your hair needs a license, but not a police officer,” Bass said.

Training could also include learning to recognize implicit bias, and alternatives to force in deescalating potentially violent situations.

Reenvision Policing

The third leg of the Bass bill would provide “grants to being to reenvision policing.”

She said “police officers don’t want to be marriage counselors, or mental health professionals or social workers.”

But the way the nation prioritizes its budgets, funding policing over education and social services, means only the police are left to deal with issues better left to other professionals.

“To invest in policing, we divested in community institutions so now police officers are marriage counselors and dealing with mental illness,” Bass said. “And we’ve replaced social workers with police in our schools.”

That process was not followed when the nation’s crime bill was passed in the wake of crack cocaine being introduced to American cities already dealing with gang violence.

“When I saw all these laws being passed, minimum sentences, I knew it would result in mass incarcerations. Instead of dealing with crack by addressing addiction; instead of increased social programs to combat issues of gang violence, we criminalized the issues,” Bass said. “And when you look at who is incarcerated disproportionately, the inequity is undeniable.”

Respect for police

One caller, Jill from Reading, worried that “we’re teaching our children that it’s OK to put their hands on authority figures.”

Another caller named John, also from Reading, said that when he was growing up “we were taught to have respect for authority figures.”

“The main problem is not lack of respect by African Americans for police,” Bass replied. “It’s a lack of understanding of our communities.”

Bass said growing up in south-central Los Angeles, “I was terrified of the police” and she had, and gave her daughter, “the talk.” Which boils down to, “if you get pulled over by the police, your main objective is to survive. I had to explain to her that if she got upset, and acted in a particular way, she could be harmed.”

That is not a talk most white parents have to give their children, she said. By way of example, she said referring to the capture of Dylann Roof, shortly after he had murdered nine people in a church in South Carolina.

When Roof, who is white, “was stopped by police, they were friendly. They made sure he got food on the way to the police station,” said Bass. “If an AfricanAmerican had just killed nine people and was being pulled over by police, I can assure you, that would not have been the case.”

“In the past, when there was a killing, even if the officer was shown on video, the response was always to question ‘what happened before?’ In the past, we haven’t been believed,” said Bass. “Police view communities of color differently.”

She said her congressional district has an affluent section and a section that is in south-central Lost Angles.

“There are police who come out of the academy, who ask to go to south- central so they can ‘knock some heads,’” Bass said. “We have guardian police officers, and we have warrior police officers, which is what we need to get rid of.”

“I come from a military background and I love the police,” said Houlahan. “But that’s my experience as a white woman. People need to be open to hearing someone else’s different experience/ The work of dismantling the systemic racism in this country is something we have to do.”

Houlahan