Democrats are running on the most progressive police reform agenda in modern American history

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Democrats are running on the most progressive police reform agenda in modern American history
Democrats may not want to defund the police, but they are more open than ever to reimagining public safety.
By Roge Karma Sep 4, 2020, 7:20am EDT


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“The first thing my colleagues wanted to do to address police violence was focus on accountability,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) tells me. “But the more of these videos that come out, the more they are realizing that just holding a few bad cops accountable isn’t enough — this is about an entire system. I think that’s a huge change.”

The most recent indication of where Democrats stand on policing is the criminal justice section of the 2020 Democratic Party platform. As my colleague Andrew Prokop explains, party platforms are consensus documents: They use inputs from a wide range of coalition actors within the party to provide a broad summary of what the party stands for and the direction it wants to move the country toward. And research has shown that, in 25 years, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Congress voted in accordance with their platforms more than 80 percent of the time.

The first thing that stands out about the Democrats’ 2020 criminal justice platform is its framing, which is unequivocal about the state of policing in America:

Democrats believe we need to overhaul the criminal justice system from top to bottom. Police brutality is a stain on the soul of our nation. It is unacceptable that millions of people in our country have good reason to fear they may lose their lives in a routine traffic stop, or while standing on a street corner, or while playing with a toy in a public park. It is unacceptable that Black parents must have “the talk” with their children, to try to protect them from the very police officers who are supposed to be sworn to protect and serve them. It is unacceptable that more than 1,000 people, a quarter of them Black, have been killed by police every year since 2015.

In terms of concrete policy proposals, the bulk of the platform’s policing agenda focuses on preventing officers from abusing their power and holding them accountable when they do. Drawing on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020 — which received unanimous support among House Democrats but has since been stymied in the Senate — it proposes policies like reining in qualified immunity, banning chokeholds, developing stricter use-of-force standards, creating a national registry of officer misconduct, and limiting no-knock warrants.

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https://www.vox.com/21418125/biden-harris-pelosi-defund-the-police-criminal-justice-reform-2020