Policing changes sought in U.S.

The Senate majority at stake, Republicans are abruptly shifting priorities to focus on policing changes as Congress rushes to respond to nationwide protests over the killings of black Americans by law enforcement officers.

The GOP senators welcomed President Donald Trump’s executive actions Tuesday to create a database of police misconduct. They gavelled open a Judiciary Committee hearing on “police use of force and community relations.” And today, they are set to unveil their own package of proposed changes to police practices and accountability.

It’s the most swift, and extensive, Republican review of law enforcement in decades, a stunning election-year turn of events after George Floyd’s

May 25 death in Minnesota. Democrats warn it does not go nearly far enough to meet the moment.

“We are at the point in the United States where we are at a crossroads,” said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., a co-author of a sweeping Democratic police overhaul package, as he led colleagues in a series of speeches in the Senate.

Booker said the choice is between “meaningful reforms and symbolic measures that will do nothing to save people’s lives.”

With the House set to pass the Democratic package, and Republicans rushing to vote on the GOP plan in the Senate as soon as next week, the two proposals are on a collision course as Congress seeks to show voters it hears the demonstrators marching in the streets.

Trump vowed a “big moment” if lawmakers could act. At a Rose Garden event for his executive actions, he declared himself “committed to working with Congress on additional measures.”

In the weeks since Floyd’s death, another black

American, 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks, was shot and killed Saturday night by police in Atlanta.

With the nation reeling and Republicans straining to hold their slim majority in the Senate this fall, Sen. Tim Scott, the GOP’s lone Republican senator, who is compiling the party’s package, warned leadership not to push voting off until later this summer, saying it would be a “bad decision.”

The two packages emerging from Democrats and Republicans in Congress share many similarities, but they take different approaches in seeking to change police practices and boost accountability.