New calls for police reform face old Democratic and Republican divisions.
The release of footage on Friday of Memphis police violently beating Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died from his injuries three days later, has renewed calls to pass federal police reform. But with the House of Representatives now in Republican hands and a closely divided Senate, the prospect for any such reform remains unlikely.
Chief among the existing proposals is Democrats’ George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the then-Democratic controlled House in 2021 without a single Republican vote, but failed in the Senate.
Ben Crump, a lawyer for the Nichols family, has publicly urged Congress to pass the bill, saying in an interview with CNN Sunday that he hoped Nichols’s death would prove to be a turning point. Democrats have echoed that sentiment, either rallying behind that bill specifically or calling for further bipartisan negotiations in the hopes of reaching a compromise that has a chance of passing.
Both Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Tim Scott (R-SC), who led unsuccessful negotiations on a police reform package in 2021, seemed receptive to giving bipartisan talks another chance in statements Friday. Booker said that he would “never stop working to build a broad coalition” necessary to pass policing reform, and Scott said that Nichols’s death should be a “call to action for every lawmaker in our nation at every level.” The Congressional Black Caucus has called, too, for both a meeting with President Joe Biden and a robust push for national criminal justice reforms.
Still, many Republicans have expressed opposition to key reforms proposed by Democrats, including limitations on qualified immunity, which protects officers from certain lawsuits. Others dismissed the need for reform at the federal level at all. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), for instance, said in an interview with NBC that, “Democrats always think that it’s a new law that’s going to fix something that terrible. We kind of think that … no new law is going to do that.”
While a divided Congress, particularly one with a slim Democratic Senate majority, makes a bipartisan policing bill unlikely, new legislation isn’t impossible: Tragedy has galvanized bipartisan action on divisive topics in the recent past.
