Vice President Kamala Harris spoke Wednesday at the funeral for Tyre Nichols, calling for Congress to pass the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.”
His death was not in pursuit of public safety, she said. “It was not in the interest of keeping the public safe,” she said.
She noted that as a senator she was a co-author of the original “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.”
The vice president added: “As Vice President of the United States, we demand that Congress pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Joe Biden will sign it and we should not delay and we will not be denied. It is non-negotiable.”
Some background: Originally introduced in 2020 and again in 2021, the legislation would set up a national registry of police misconduct to stop officers from evading consequences for their actions by moving to another jurisdiction.
It would ban racial and religious profiling by law enforcement at the federal, state and local levels, and it would overhaul qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that critics say shields law enforcement from accountability.
The bill twice cleared the House under Democratic control – in 2020 and 2021 – largely along party lines. But it never went anywhere in the Senate, even after Democrats won control in 2021, in part, because of disagreements about qualified immunity, which protects police officers from being sued in civil court.
