Why police are calling out Republicans for torpedoing this Democratic bill
Even police are calling out the GOP's bad-faith sabotage of the Democrats' criminal justice reform.
By Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC Opinion Columnist
Republicans torpedoed efforts by Democrats to pass criminal justice reform legislation last week, despite the fact that Democrats made huge concessions to get them on board. One sign of how unreasonable the Republican position on the bill was: They’re being called out by the police — the very group Republicans claimed to be defending in negotiations — for their bad-faith handling of the legislation.
Two of the biggest organizations representing the police in America, the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the National Fraternal Order of Police, released a joint statement Tuesday slamming the GOP without naming them:
Despite some media reports, at no point did any legislative draft propose ‘defunding the police.’ In fact, the legislation specifically provided additional funding to assist law enforcement agencies in training, agency accreditation, and data collection initiatives. It is our joint belief that the provisions under discussion would have strengthened the law enforcement profession and helped improve the state of community police engagement without compromising management and officers’ rights, authorities, and legal protections.
While the statement takes issue with the claims in “media reports,” this is really a shot at Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who stonewalled the bill on the basis that it allegedly defunded the police. The problem with that line of reasoning was that it was not only false, but that Scott in fact once backed the very idea that he was referring to as “defunding.” The whole episode is driving home how Republicans have no serious interest in making policing safer, despite how congenial they sounded about moderate police reform in the wake of the murder of George Floyd last year.
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Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Thursday, September 30th 2021 at 6:09PM
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