It has been two years since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis Police officers. Floyd was asphyxiated by an officer who put his knee to Floyd's neck and kept it there even as Floyd lost consciousness. For nine long minutes, Floyd was suffocated as other officers looked on. The brutality evident in the video footage of the event led to a summer of protests.
It did not, however, lead to federal policing reforms. This is because the Senate in particular is a vehicle for obstructing justice, not producing it; no matter what proposals reformers came up with, each was rejected by Senate Republicans who insisted that the measures would unduly stifle law enforcement. Now, after two years, President Joe Biden is taking matters into his own hands with a new executive order on the anniversary of Floyd's May 25, 2020 death.
Executive orders are far more limited in what they can accomplish than new laws would be, and there is the real possibility that such orders will simply be undone the moment a Republican president again takes office. But it is something, and something is a damn lot better than staring into the soulless abyss of the United States Senate and waiting for a moment of decency to pop out of the void.
The history of how we got here is depressing; you can look to The Grio for a brief rundown of how Senate reform efforts were stifled.
In a somewhat unusual situation, the details of what will be in tomorrow's order haven’t yet been leaked, but the White House has been focusing on executive fixes that would fill in for the police reform legislation that was stonewalled in the Senate.
We can expect that much of the order will emphasize partnerships with police departments, rather than retaliatory measures aimed at them. Much of the current reform efforts consist of reviving the reform efforts that Donald Trump's band of white nationalist saboteurs shut down, reforms that emphasize what we know about effective policing tactics so that law enforcement departments have reason to move away from tactics that don't. This is complicated by the reality that many, many American law enforcement agencies are themselves staffed with some of the nation's most raging racists, people attracted to the idea of sanctioned violence to begin with. To reform that will require police departments to be willing to crack down on criminal behaviors inside their own ranks—and that is a job that will likely never be done unless it is done through federal government intervention. The culture of American policing has thwarted internal reform efforts for, approximately, forever.
At least one new reform is long overdue. On Friday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a new policy requiring federal law enforcement agencies to intervene if they witness other law enforcement agents using excessive force. It is an obvious reform in the wake of the Floyd murder, in which one police officer committed the killing even as his fellow officers watched it happen, and one of the core reforms demanded both by social justice groups and law enforcement experts. But it only applies to federal agents and agencies; the rest of American policing will have to adopt those same standards themselves.
There is another reform that would solve much of what has poisoned American policing in one fell swoop. In response to conservative demands that the public is allowed to not just keep, but parade with weapons of war capable of killing dozens in the span of minutes, modern American police departments now train their officers to expect to be outgunned and possibly murdered during every last traffic stop, domestic call, bar fight, and midnight patrol. Police have been trained to respond to every situation with sufficient violence to subdue whoever they deem to be a threat. Again: It has been building for decades. Previous iterations of American life did not see men strapping assault rifles to themselves to get coffee, and people who did would be presumed to be up to no good; in previous iterations of American life, carrying a concealed handgun was both illegal and vanishingly rare. The Supreme Court is most responsible for over-arming the public in successive waves that each inspired more violence-focused police training than previous officers received, and here we are.
But getting rid of the sea of guns is not a reform Biden can make, and not a reform that the increasingly sedition-minded conservative class could abide. So we'll do the other things, attempting to peel off layers of trained violence inside our police departments while the people who claim to "support" law enforcement the most scream the loudest for the right to outgun them.