Congress Left Behind in Rush for Police Reform

From Eric Garner to Freddie Gray, the deaths of more than a dozen black people at the hands of police officers in the past year have led to widespread protests and tough questions about the relationship between law enforcement and the communities they serve.

While demonstrations have sparked calls for change that have echoed through city halls and statehouses and drawn responses from the Justice Department and President Barack Obama, the rush to reform has largely bypassed lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who at times have appeared powerless to address the local crises.

Unlike the 1990s, in which an epidemic of drug-fueled violent crime in U.S. cities prompted federal legislators to fund police officers, stiffen jail sentences and construct more prisons, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, acknowledged that Congress’ role in the current effort to address fractured relations between police and residents may be limited at best.

“We’re looking at it to see what would be appropriate,” he said at a National Press Club event last week, suggesting one possible role would be to ensure that any fatal police-involved shooting of a minority would trigger a federal investigation. However, Grassley was clear in saying he had no interest in federalizing local law enforcement or in second-guessing the actions of officers or agencies.

“It may be that we’ll decide not to do anything,” he said.

Pamela Meanes, the president of the National Bar Association, agreed that Congress is somewhat limited in its power, but she said lawmakers had failed to act where they could, by broadening grants contingent on making improvements or in changing the federal standards to encourage de-escalation of force and lower the bar for civil rights violations.

“Congress cannot force a local government to pass a police-brutality statute or any type of body-camera law, but they can attach it as part of their grant giving,” she said a conference call with reporters last week.

A handful of bills have been introduced in the House, where the Judiciary Committee on Monday announced it would hold a hearing later this month to “examine police accountability [and] aggression towards law enforcement.”

Some proposals have suggested guiding the issuance of grants based on state and local compliance with training and prosecutorial recommendations or demanding thorough data collection on police-caused deaths.

Other bills follow up on recommendations released in March from Obama’s 21st Century Policing Task Force, including offering financial aid to local police departments and setting standards for best practices in order to improve department and community relations. Among the most prominent proposals has been an effort to increase police use of on-body cameras.

Introduced by Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Fla., and Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, the Police CAMERA Act would establish a pilot program to assist local agencies in purchasing and implementing the necessary equipment.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, appeared supportive of outfitting officers with body cameras.

“I think that if you look at what’s happened over the course of the last year, you’ve just got to scratch your head,” he said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Asked if federal money should be used to obtain the technology, he said, “We have got a lot of police grants that we already have on the books that can be used for this. Why not?”

Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., has put forward three bills aimed at tackling what advocates have identified as significant problems contributing to the crisis.

The Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act would seek to reduce the flow of equipment belonging to the Department of Defense to local police. That bill was prompted by the law-enforcement response to demonstrations after the fatal shooting in August of black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. A militarized force of officers deployed heavy weaponry against protesters, raising questions about where the equipment came from and whether its use was an overreaction to conditions. The bill has 45 cosponsors, including two Republicans.

Johnson’s Police Accountability Act insists law enforcement officers be subject to the same punishments for assault or homicide as anyone else, while his Grand Jury Reform Act demands any death at the hands of a police officer be reported to the local prosecutor and then a special prosecutor be appointed within four days of the incident or the jurisdiction will lose out on certain federal grants. The latter bill was again inspired by events in Ferguson, where the most intense demonstrations came after local prosecutors announced a grand jury had declined to bring charges against the officer who fatally shot Brown.

“There are two different systems of treatment, two systems of justice: one for the police, because if he had not been a police officer under those circumstances he would have been arrested right there that same night, charged with a felony,” Johnson said on the House floor last month. “So, when these kind of things happen and people don't get charged, then it is a license for other officers to be reckless themselves, and so what we have had is a cascade of reckless behavior which has resulted in people being killed and there being no penalty, and so it just continues.”

None of the bills has gone past the initial legislative stages into serious consideration.

The cautious approach may not be unwise. The reforms instituted in the 1990s to enhance criminal penalties and provide law enforcement with the resources to fight violent crime associated with drug trafficking have been widely criticized in the two decades since, with some saying they created the climate of distrust that now exists between police and minority communities.

Frederick Harris, a professor of political science at Columbia University and the director of its Center on African-American Politics and Society, says the best approach at this point may be for lawmakers to collect information in order to prevent a misguided response.

“There’s no unified statistics that are available to us on how many police shootings there have been,” Harris says. He recommends requiring the collection of data including the race and gender of each person who dies at the hands of an officer, whether they were armed and the race of the officer involved along with characteristics of the neighborhood in which the incident took place.

“Obviously a lot of them are mostly unarmed black men,” he says. “But we just don’t know the figures. There is risk in developing policies around these issues without having a road map.”