Democrats’ legislation would overhaul police accountability

Washington — Democrats are proposing to overhaul legal protections for police, create a national database of excessive-force episodes and ban police chokeholds in legislation coming today in response to the deaths of black Americans at the hands of law enforcement, according to a draft outline obtained by The Associated Press.

“We’re in a real moment in our country,” Rep. Karen Bass, D-Ca., chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” speaking after days of massive protests set off by the police-involved deaths of George Floyd and other African Americans.

She said the package from House and Senate Democrats will be bolder than any law enforcement changes of the past decade. “It is time for police culture in many departments to change,” she said. “And we believe that the legislation will make a major step forward in that direction.”

The Justice in Policing Act confronts several aspects of law enforcement accountability and practices that have come under criticism, especially as more and more police violence is captured on cellphone video and shared widely across the nation, and the world.

The draft document said the proposed legislation would revise the federal criminal police misconduct statute to make it easier to prosecute officers who are involved in misconduct “knowingly or with reckless disregard.”

The package also would change “qualified immunity” protections for police “to enable individuals to recover damages when law enforcement officers violate their constitutional rights,” it says.

The legislation would seek to provide greater oversight and transparency of police behavior in several ways. For one, it would grant subpoena power to the Justice Department to conduct “pattern and practice” investigations of potential misconduct and help states conduct independent investigations.

And it would create a “National Police Misconduct Registry,” a database to try to prevent officers from transferring from one department to another with past misconduct undetected, the draft said.

A long-sought federal anti-lynching bill stalled in Congress is included in the package.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., a co-author with Bass and the Democratic senators, will convene a hearing on the legislation this week.

It is unclear if law enforcement and the powerful police unions will back any of the proposed changes or if congressional Republicans will join the effort.

At least one Republican, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who has long pushed for a criminal justice overhaul, has said he’d like to review the package coming from Democrats.

The presumed Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, has backed a ban on chokeholds and other elements of the package.

Sen. Cory Booker, a Democratic rival who had been critical of Biden during the presidential primary campaign, said he “fully” put his faith in Biden now “to be the person who could preside over this transformative change.”

“This is a referendum on who we are as Americans and who we’re going to be to each other,” Booker said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Booker and fellow one-time presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris of California are co-authors of the package in the Senate.