January 30, 2023
After watching the video of Tyre Nichols being beaten by police officers on the streets of Memphis, you may be wondering – what is Congress doing? Are lawmakers even working on police reform anymore?
The short answer is at this point no. But there are renewed calls for congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. That law passed the Democrat-controlled house back in 2021 but never passed the senate. It would have done several things including — limiting qualified immunity policies that protect officers accused of misconduct, creating a national registry of disciplinary actions against officers so that their bad conduct follows them to other police agencies, it would have banned certain chokeholds and limited no-knock warrants. I actually did a whole series of videos on this bill.
Congress has a lot of options, they can reintroduce this bill, they can tweak it, add or subtract provisions and then introduce it or do nothing. It seems right now, lawmakers are doing a lot of talking about the problem.
