WASHINGTON – A police reform package cleared the US House of Representatives yesterday, five days before the trial of a white officer charged with murdering African-American George Floyd.
The bill is named after Floyd, who died last May 25 when then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on the victim’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds.
The shocking killing was caught on video and sparked mass protests across the nation in the midst of the 2020 election trail.
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act cleared the House last year but was blocked in the Republican-led Senate.
With President Joe Biden in office since January, and the Senate narrowly controlled by Democrats, the bill was reintroduced last week and it passed yesterday largely along party lines, 220 to 212.
Just one Republican supported the measure, while two Democrats opposed it.
“Nearly one year ago, George Floyd gasped his last words, ‘I can’t breathe,’ and ignited a nationwide reckoning on the racial injustice and police brutality in America,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said before the vote.
“This legislation will not erase centuries of systemic racism and excessive policing in America,” but it takes a “tremendous step” toward stopping the violence and improving relations between law enforcement and communities, she added.
The bill now heads to the Senate, where its fate is uncertain given that the chamber is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.
A watered down version of the bill has a higher likelihood of reaching Biden for his signature.
The president told Democrats yesterday that he “strongly” supports the full bill.
The measure eyes an end to chokeholds and no-knock warrants, racial profiling, limits the transfer of military equipment to local police forces, expands police training, and establishes a database to track officer misconduct.
Its most controversial provision is likely the restriction of officer immunity. The longstanding legal doctrine shields police from civil lawsuits – something which Pelosi and other Democrats have criticized as unfairly protecting police from accountability.
Republicans have argued that the measure would strip police forces of funding, tie the hands of officers and make communities less safe.
House Republican Debbie Lesko warned that the bill “leaves police unequipped to deal with dangerous or life-threatening situations and limits the tools that police can use in the field.”
Floyd’s family heralded the bill’s House passage in a statement from their lawyers yesterday evening.
“This represents a major step forward to reform the relationship between police officers and communities of color and impose accountability on law enforcement officers whose conscious decisions preserve the life or cause the death of Americans, including so many people of color,” attorneys Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci said in the statement.
The trial of Chauvin, charged with second-degree murder of Floyd, begins Monday in Minneapolis.
Elsewhere during the session, the House also passed a bill aimed at lowering voting barriers nationwide, a top Democratic priority.
The For the People Act would expand no-excuse voting by mail, make voter registration automatic, outlaw partisan redistricting and impose new requirements on so-called dark money donations to political groups.
The measure largely mirrors a House bill passed two years ago. This one carries added significance amid efforts by several Republican-controlled state legislatures to curtail voting access in response to Donald Trump’s election loss and his repeated false claims of election fraud. – AFP, March 4, 2021
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