Home Minority Chief Hakeem Jeffries believes there may be “an pressing want” to maneuver police reform laws “ahead” following latest developments within the Tyre Nichols case.
Throughout Jeffries’ weekly press convention on Friday, the congressman advised theGrio, “Within the earlier two Congresses, Home Democrats have led the hassle to attempt to get complete police reform measures enacted into legislation.”
In recent times, Home Democrats have launched laws to fight police brutality; nevertheless, it has didn’t move on account of an absence of assist from Congressional members on each side of the political aisle.
In 2023, Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., reintroduced the Folks’s Response Act, which aimed to offer native communities, significantly Black communities, with different sources to policing when responding to broad public well being points.
In 2021, Home Democrats re-introduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act named after George Floyd, who was murdered by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020.
The act aimed to overtake certified immunity, ban no-knock warrants, and prohibit racial profiling; nevertheless, the invoice confronted opposition within the Senate.
Jeffries advised theGrio, “We’ve obtained to strike the suitable steadiness between public security, strengthening the connection between legislation enforcement and the group, and avoiding to the best extent doable and eliminating police brutality in America.”
The Home minority chief’s remarks come a day after former Memphis police officer Desmond Mills Jr. pleaded responsible to state and federal fees within the dying of Tyre Nichols.

Mills entered a plea settlement; in change for pleading responsible, prosecutors will suggest a 15-year sentence for his involvement within the 29-year-old’s beating dying.
Mills is one in all 5 former Memphis cops caught on digicam kicking, punching, and beating Nichols throughout a site visitors cease on Jan. 7. Just a few days later, Nichols succumbed to his accidents.
“That is what accountability appears like,” the NAACP stated in an announcement on X. “Now, it’s time for Congress to step up and enact the federal reforms obligatory to stop the continual trauma inflicted on the Black group.”
Following Nichols’ dying, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.Y., issued an announcement that learn, “In recent times I’ve labored with households, civil rights leaders, native mayors, activists, legislation enforcement leaders…who all share the identical understanding that we are able to increase the degrees of transparency, accountability, and professionalism in American policing.”

Booker, who served as a lead negotiator in an unsuccessful bipartisan effort to move the Floyd invoice, stated Congress “can do higher, we should do higher.”
The senator added, “This second calls for once more that we muster the collective political will to behave.”
In a earlier interview with Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., he advised theGrio that he believes Congress can do extra to fight police brutality.
“We had an entire vary of reforms that got here up in the summertime of 2020 that have been pushed by the Congressional Black Caucus, they usually made it to the Home,” stated Raskin, “however then it hit a brick wall within the Senate.”
“We must always return to all of these reforms,” he continued.

Jeffries advised theGrio that his Republican counterparts have made it difficult to push ahead police reform. Nonetheless, he stays hopeful.
“We’re underneath no illusions because it pertains to the unwillingness of maximum Republicans within the Home to do something to strengthen the relationships between the police and communities of shade all through America,” stated the Democratic chief.
“It’s my hope that the conversations that have been bipartisan in nature earlier within the Congress, within the Senate, will resume in some unspecified time in the future led by Cory Booker.”
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