US police reform on the brink as key Democrats deal a blow to Senate Republican proposal

'This bill is not salvageable," Senators Harris, Booker, and Schumer say

Democratic Senate bellwethers on policing reform have thrown down the gauntlet, announcing they will oppose the Republican majority's proposed legislation scheduled for a procedural vote on Wednesday.

"This bill is not salvageable and we need bipartisan talks to get to a constructive starting point," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris wrote to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in a letter on Tuesday.

Mr Booker and Ms Harris, the only two black Senate Democrats, have been leading voices on criminal justice and policing reform in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and other black people who have died in altercations with police this summer.

Their decision to oppose the GOP bill proposed by Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only other black senator and the lone GOP black senator, is a strong indicator other Democrats in the chamber will also vote to torpedo the bill.

Although Republicans control the Senate, they need 60 votes to block a filibuster and move the bill into the amendment phase. That means seven Democrats or Democratic-caucusing independents must vote with Republicans to keep the bill alive.

Mr McConnell has needled his Democratic counterparts, accusing them of partisan gamesmanship to block what he believes is a good starting point for negotiations.

“I hope that whatever strange political calculations are making this difficult for our friends across the aisle will yield to common sense and to the American people’s hunger for progress," the majority leader said on Monday.

But bipartisan cooperation to get Mr Scott's bill, the so-called JUSTICE Act, to the floor debate and amendment process appears less and less likely.

"We will not meet this moment by holding a floor vote on the JUSTICE Act, nor can we simply amend this bill, which is so threadbare and lacking in substance that it does not even provide a proper baseline for negotiations," Mr Booker, Ms Harris, and Mr Schumer wrote to Mr McConnell on Tuesday.

Chief among the Senate Democrats' concerns is that Mr Scott's bill reforms neither police departments' criminal nor civil liability when officers use violent or deadly force on people.

"It is absolutely imperative that any meaningful policing reform contains accountability provisions to ensure that no one, including law enforcement officers, is above the law — and the JUSTICE Act does nothing to meet that urgent need," the Democratic senators wrote.

House Democrats, meanwhile, are expected to vote this week on their own policing reform legislation that Mr Booker and Ms Harris also helped to introduce.

That legislation would reform “qualified immunity laws” to make it easier to sue police and other government agencies for misconduct, a proposal the Trump administration has dismissed as non-negotiable. Democrats' bill would also change the language of section 242 of title 18 of the US criminal code to make it easier to prosecute law enforcement officers for misconduct.

At the national level, it would ban choke holds and no-knock warrants in drug cases, while incentivising state and local entities to institute similar restrictions in order to receive federal funding. And it would create a national database of police misconduct so problematic officers cannot simply move to a different part of the state or country and get a new policing job, among many other provisions.

Senate Republicans' bill also attempts to curb choke holds by withholding funding for departments that do not institute restrictions. But those restrictions are more narrowly defined than the ones in House Democrats' bill.

The Republican bill would not ban no-knock warrants, but it would compel law enforcement to report their use of no-knock warrants for oversight and transparency.

Despite the frosty rhetoric in both parties, the Democratic and GOP bills overlap on many issues, which had sprung hope for a rare legislative compromise in a highly contentious presidential election year.

Both bills include:

• an anti-lynching measure aimed at protecting minorities from hate crimes;
• provisions to either incentivise or mandate local law enforcement entities to report use-of-force incidents to a nationally centralised database at the Justice Department; and
• incentives for de-escalation and racial bias training.

An executive order signed by Mr Trump this week calls for the DOJ to create a national database to track documented officer misconduct, a provision codified in the Democrats’ bill.

Mr Booker, Ms Harris, and Mr Schumer ended their letter on Tuesday with a plea to Mr McConnell to bring "meaningful legislation" to the floor for a vote.

"This is a serious challenge requiring serious solutions. Bringing the JUSTICE Act to the floor of the Senate is a woefully inadequate response," the senators wrote.