Past police reform defeats frustrate divided Congress

WASHINGTON — Weeks before President Joe Biden made his first address to Congress in 2021, a graphic video was released of a Black man being killed at the hands of police.

The country watched the now hauntingly familiar scene play out across its screens. Family members tearfully pleaded for change. Lawmakers in Washington pledged to pass meaningful reform.

Biden pumped momentum into talks during the nationally televised address telling Congress to “get it done” by the next month, the anniversary of a Minneapolis police officer’s killing of another Black man, George Floyd.

“We’ve all seen the knee of injustice on the neck of Black Americans,” the Democratic president said. “Now is our opportunity to make some real progress.”

And then, as before, negotiations fell apart along partisan lines, pushing the issue of police brutality to the back of the line of legislative priorities, underscoring again how Congress often fails to deliver solutions even when there is broad agreement on the problem.

Nearly two years later, as Biden begins his third year in office, there is another deadly sequel. A video released last week showed the violent Jan. 7 encounter between Tyre Nichols and the Memphis, Tennessee, police officers who savagely beat the 29-year-old Black FedEx worker for three minutes while screaming profanities at him.

Nichols was hospitalized and died days later. Five police officers, who also are Black, have been fired and charged with second-degree murder and other offenses in his beating and death. On Monday, two more Memphis police officers were disciplined and three emergency medical technicians were fired in connection with the case.

Nichols’ parents are set to attend Biden’s State of the Union address next week, hoping to increase pressure on the president and Washington. And the same lawmakers who were close to a deal the last time are now looking to see if any remnants of a compromise have the chance of passing a newly divided Congress.

“I don’t speak on this floor very often,” Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said on the Senate floor Monday. “But this is my 10th speech on policing in America in eight years.”

Scott went on to call out Democrats for asking him to “come back to the table” following the release of the Nichols video over the weekend despite blocking his legislation from passing two years ago.

“I never left the table,” the only Black Republican senator said in an emotional speech.

Scott emerged as one of the lead negotiators in the Senate after the brutal police killing of Floyd in 2020. He and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker — two of the three Black men serving in the chamber — embarked on a nine-month, painstaking negotiation.