Tell your Senators: Support the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and strengthen it in the Senate
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Call Script
My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.
I hope you will give the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act your full support and strengthen it in the Senate in the areas of police accountability, the scope and transparency of police misconduct data collection, demilitarization of police forces, and the allocation of funding. Criminal justice reform, and an end to qualified immunity, in the USA is long overdue.
Email/Resistbot Version
My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.
Criminal justice reform in the USA is long overdue, as we learned through the excruciating process required to obtain a conviction of Derek Chauvin for murdering George Floyd. While the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act (GFJPA) is not perfect, it is a great start and we hope you will give it your full support and strengthen it in the Senate. Had the GFJPA been in effect before 2020, George Floyd might still be alive today.
Some of its most important elements are an end to qualified immunity (a legal precedent that gives government officials, including police officers, broad protections against lawsuits), collection of data on police misconduct, stronger federal oversight, a prohibition against racial profiling, strengthened deescalation training, and limits to the violence police are allowed to use (making choke-holds and no-knock warrants for federal drug cases illegal).
We share the hopes of civil rights groups that the GFJPA will be strengthened in the Senate, in the areas of police accountability, the scope and transparency of police misconduct data collection, demilitarization of police forces, and the allocation of funding.
Background
The House of Representatives passed H.R. 7120, the original George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, in June of 2020, in response to worldwide demonstrations sparked by the killing of George Floyd by then-police officer Derek Chauvin and the deaths of dozens of other unarmed Black Americans at the hands of the police. Senator McConnell did not bring it to the senate floor for consideration.
On Wednesday, April 21, 2021, The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was introduced in this 117th Congress as H.R. 1280 and passed 219 to 213, with only one Republican vote.
In 2020, we witnessed incident after incident of violence against Black Americans by current and former police officers: February: Ahmaud Arbery, March: Breonna Taylor, May: George Floyd. For 3 weeks, sustained protests erupted worldwide after graphic video emerged of George Floyd’s slow and excruciating death. It was only after protests erupted and the killings received national attention that police departments expedited their investigations and arrested the killers of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd.
“Protesters demand an end to police violence, accountability of the officers involved in the shootings, and police reforms. After years of focusing on training and supervision, it is time to demand action from elected officials, and policymakers who are responsible for funding police departments, managing police leadership and making and implementing laws governing police misconduct and accountability.”
Sherrilyn Ifill, NAACP Legal Defense Fund
Public safety is primarily the responsibility of state and local governments, but there are precedents for federal action. In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act, after the brutal highly-publicized police beating of Rodney King. It allowed the US Attorney General to investigate police departments engaging in patterns or practices of unlawful policing. There have been 69 investigations since then, resolving civil rights violations resulting in 40 agreements from 1994-2017.
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act is a welcome step, but Civil Rights Organizations have recommended strengthening it in the following areas:
Congress should use its legislative authority to ensure that federal agencies providing funding to state and local law enforcement comply with Civil Rights laws, such as Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (3)
Limitations on qualified immunity should apply retroactively (3)
National police misconduct database should be expanded in its scope and accessible to all. (3 & 4)
Limitations of the transfer of military equipment to the police are encouraging, but should go farther. (3 & 4)
Stricter guardrails are needed on the allocation of federal funding. (4)
“Providing more dollars to the criminal-legal system expressly contradicts what our coalition has reasonably requested – to condition existing federal dollars received by states on the adoption of the critical policies outlined in the bill.”
“The bill also allocates new resources to the Department of Justice to study and implement best practices in training and accreditation, among other things. These resources could be better spent supporting community-led solutions to reimagining public safety.”
“Provisions in the bill allowing for grant funds to develop uniform standards on school safety — including with respect to use of lethal and nonlethal force — raise concerns about reinforcing the role of law enforcement in schools through the use of school resource officers.”
“The bill allocates grant dollars for body worn cameras, without restrictions to prevent them from contributing to our already bloated surveillance infrastructure. Specifically, the bill does not fully prohibit use of biometric and facial surveillance on footage obtained from these cameras. This omission is particularly striking, given that many jurisdictions already prohibit such actions and that a multitude of private companies, including Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Google, halted sales of face recognition to the police due to concerns that it can exacerbate existing police abuses.”
“A vast and diverse collection of people, from coast to coast, and from streets across our nation, are calling on lawmakers to prioritize Black communities. It is time to change our laws to make “Black Lives Matter” more than a slogan. Congress has begun the process of heeding those calls with the historic introduction of The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, but we can, and should go, further. We urge Congress to include the policy changes our coalition offers in order to perfect this bill and rectify the systemic racism that has taken the lives of countless Black and Brown people.
Ultimately, however, we must note that while the JPA takes important steps to address police violence and accountability, these changes will only take us so far. Congress must also reexamine federal spending priorities and shrink the footprint of the police and criminal legal system in this country. This means shifting billions of federal, taxpayer dollars away from criminalization, including policing, toward rebuilding communities of color, especially Black communities, which have been historically underfunded, under resourced and decimated by systemic racism.”
References
The bill itself: H.R. 1280: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1280
Overview: https://www.vox.com/2021/3/3/22295856/george-floyd-justice-in-policing-act-2021-passed-house
Sherrilyn Iffill, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, testimony in Support of GFJPA. Watch: https://www.naacpldf.org/news/sherrilyn-ifill-testifies-in-support-of-the-justice-in-policing-act-at-the-us-house-of-representatives/ Read: PDF of full testimony, available on the same page
Limitations of House Bill 7120, passed in June 2020, per Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights: https://civilrights.org/resource/coalition-letter-on-h-r-7120-george-floyd-justice-in-policing-act/