Now is the time to pursue long-overdue police reform
Sometimes, life comes at you fast.
Just ask the Republican leaders who’ve observed the events of the past two weeks.
The horrific killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police — he was laid to rest outside Houston on Tuesday — has led to a sustained outpouring of outrage over systemic racism and police violence. The groundswell has leaders on both sides of the aisle talking about the need for action.
“I’m dedicated to rooting out racial injustices so no other family has to experience what George Floyd’s family has,” U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican, tweeted Monday afternoon. “It will require bipartisan commitment across the country & listening to the voices of those who have been most affected is the first step — we must not fail to act.”
Within minutes, he was welcomed to the cause by U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a San Antonio Democrat.
“Great to hear, John,” Castro deadpanned. “Will you support the Justice in Policing Act?”
Cornyn dismissed his fellow
Texan’s invitation to endorse the measure, introduced this week by U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, a California Democrat who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus.
“Serious issues require serious bipartisan work in order to make progress,” responded Cornyn, who is up for re-election this fall. “Partisan grand
standing is not serious.”
But by Tuesday morning, Cornyn had recalibrated his message.
While Cornyn dismissed proposals to “defund or even disband the police” in a news release, he said “we need to do a top-to-bottom review of our criminal justice system— something that has not happened in more than 50 years.”
We’ll have to wait and see what kind of proposals are put forward by the Republicans who control the U.S. Senate and the Texas Legislature. A cynic might suspect that Republicans who have expressed a tentative interest in police reform in recent days will turn to other priorities once the public furor subsides.
But for Republican leaders such as Cornyn to publicly call for police reform constitutes a clear shift and a victory of sorts for the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in the wake of the police-involved shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.
There are many different proposed federal reforms on the table, already. The Justice in Policing Act backed by congressional Democrats would, among other things, scale back qualified immunity for police officers; require state and local law enforcement agencies to report use-offorce data, disaggregated by race; and ban chokeholds, carotid holds, and no-knock warrants.
Local and state officials are looking at what they can do.
In Houston, Mayor Sylvester Turner announced at Floyd’s funeral that he will sign an executive order banning chokeholds, and require police officers to give a verbal warning before shooting as well as to intervene when they witness misconduct by other officers. Turner’s budget proposal increases police department funding even as many call for diverting funds to other areas.
Meanwhile, Democrats on the Harris County Commissioners Court plan to establish a universal use-of-force policy for all county law enforcement agencies and, potentially, an independent civilian oversight board. And the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement will now train new police officers in the state in implicit bias training, after state Rep. Garnet Coleman, a
Houston Democrat, requested such a change via the regulatory process.
Some on the left feel that such reforms don’t go far enough. The Minneapolis City Council on Monday voted to disband the city’s police department in lieu of “a new, transformative model for cultivating safety in Minneapolis.” And calls to “defund the police” have accelerated on social media — causing some angst among Democrats who feel that such a slogan misrepresents the goal of police reform and could alarm voters in November.
Still, racial injustice undermines public safety — and never in recent times have we seen such momentum for reforming policing in this country.
“Southern Baptists, we need to say it clearly as a gospel issue: Black lives matter,” said J.D. Greear, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, in a Facebook live video Tuesday.
And though Democrats have accused President Donald Trump of fanning “the flames of division” with his law-and-order rhetoric, top aides met on Tuesday with U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the chamber, to discuss his ideas on police reform.
This may be a recognition that many voters are growing uncomfortable with the trend of police shootings of unarmed African-Americans and Trump’s response to it.
A Monmouth University poll released this week finds that 76 percent of all Americans consider racial discrimination to be a big problem in the United States — and that 49 percent of white Americans say that police are more likely to use excessive force against a black suspect, up from 25 percent in 2016.
And no wonder. Floyd’s death, at age 46, did not occur in a vacuum.
When he was remembered Tuesday at his funeral in Houston, guests of his family included relatives of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Botham Jean and Ahmaud Arbery — unarmed black men killed either by current or former law enforcement officers or those claiming to be assisting police. Those relatives are just a few of the bereaved Americans who have lost loved ones due to systemic ills that need desperately to be addressed.