In an abrupt change of course, the mayor of New York vowed to cut the budget of the nation’s largest police force. In Los Angeles, the mayor called for redirecting millions of dollars from policing after protesters gathered outside his home. And in Minneapolis, City Council members pledged to dismantle their police force and completely reinvent how public safety is handled, The New York Times reported.
As tens of thousands of people have demonstrated against police violence over the past two weeks, calls have emerged in cities across the country for fundamental changes to American policing.
The pleas for change have taken a variety of forms — including measures to restrict police use of military-style equipment and efforts to require officers to face strict discipline in cases of misconduct, the Times noted.
Parks, universities and schools have distanced themselves from local police departments, severing contracts. In some places, the calls for change have gone still further, aiming to abolish police departments, shift police funds into social services or defund police departments partly or entirely.
“It is a critical time that we can see concrete change,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who last week addressed the crowd gathered for a memorial service for George Floyd, the black man who died after a white police officer pressed his knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes in Minneapolis last month. “The legislation and the policy changes will be the ones that determine the victory of this movement.”
Democrats in Congress on Monday unveiled legislation aimed at ending excessive use of force by the police and making it easier to identify, track and prosecute police misconduct. The measures were seen as the most expansive intervention into policing that federal lawmakers have proposed in recent memory.
The legislation would curtail protections that shield police officers accused of misconduct from being prosecuted and would set restrictions aimed at barring officers from using deadly force except as a last resort.
The fate of the measures was far from certain; they were expected to pass swiftly in the Democratic-led House, but President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers have yet to signal what measures, if any, they would accept. The legislation under consideration does not contemplate defunding police departments and falls short of what many protesters have demanded.
For his part, Trump on Monday discarded proposals to remove funds from police departments. “We won’t be defunding our police,” he said. “We won’t be dismantling our police.” His attorney general, William Barr, said that it would be wrong to reduce police budgets in part because he felt the country needed more policing to preserve public safety, and warned that the nation would see “chaos” and “more killings” should any major city disband its department.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, “does not believe that police should be defunded,” a campaign spokesman said on Monday, adding that Biden “supports the urgent need for reform” as well as financial support for community policing programs.
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