Following the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other high-profile, fatal police shootings last year of Black people, bipartisan congressional talks on overhauling policing practices ended Wednesday without an agreement.
“It was clear that we were not making the progress that we needed to make,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., told reporters. He cited continued disagreements over Democrats’ efforts to make officers personally liable for abuses, raising professional standards and collecting national data on police agencies’ use of force.
PBS
However, in a press release, Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina lied and said the negotiations ended because Democrats “could not let go of their push to defund our law enforcement,” Defunding the police had never been the focus of police reform. In fact, most members of the Democratic Party in Congress reject the idea of defunding the police. But, they favor police reform and holding police officers accountable and personally liable for their actions.
Watch Senator Booker on Morning Joe talk about how negotiations on police reform ended:
