WASHINGTON — One year after President Biden used the State of the Union address to celebrate billions in federal funds for police departments, the president struck a different tone this week after yet another person was killed at the hands of law enforcement.
With the parents of Tyre Nichols, the Black man who died after being beaten by police in Memphis, sitting in the audience on Tuesday evening, Mr. Biden said in his annual address to Congress that it was time to “finish the job on police reform.”
“When police officers or police departments violate the public trust, they must be held accountable,” Mr. Biden said. “All of us in this chamber, we need to rise to this moment.”
Mr. Biden’s speech included one of the most impassioned calls for police accountability of his presidency, but many of his efforts to overhaul policing in America have been incomplete.
Mr. Biden, who has deep ties to police unions, has tried to strike a balance on police reform as Republicans accuse his administration of being soft on crime. He has rejected calls by some in his party to “defund the police,” instead calling on state and local governments to use money from the American Rescue Plan to hire more police officers and bolster enforcement.
Biden’s State of the Union Address
Mr. Biden has made some progress on reform, as well: He has restricted the transfer of military equipment local police can receive from the federal government, an effort started by the Obama administration but reversed under the Trump administration.
He directed each federal law enforcement agency to restrict chokeholds and no-knock warrants, while ordering agencies to establish new use-of-force standards that aligned with an updated Justice Department policy.
And the White House is hoping it can persuade state and local departments to adopt new policies by leveraging millions of dollars of discretionary grants. The administration has said it will prioritize issuing the funds to departments that revise their use-of-force policies.
But the administration is only just starting the application process. And many of Mr. Biden’s most ambitious goals are still in progress, if not hopelessly stalled.
“Far too many Black people have lost their lives due to police violence, and yet I cannot name a single law that has been passed to address this issue,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “We still need strong policies signed into law that will finally end the horrors of police brutality and hold officers accountable for their misconduct.”
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The president has repeatedly called for the passing of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, only to have it held up in Congress amid Republican opposition. The bill would impose new restrictions on the use of deadly force and eliminate legal protections, known as qualified immunity, that shield police officers from civil lawsuits.
Members of Congress are in the early stages of talks on a more narrow police reform bill, though there is still marginal momentum behind the efforts.
Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the No. 2 Democrat, said in an interview that he had begun talks with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the top Republican on the committee, about a police reform bill.
Mr. Durbin said he believed the Senate should negotiate a deal to improve policing even if House Republicans are opposed.
“We’ve got to do our job and do it in a thoughtful, professional way,” Mr. Durbin said.
In the absence of congressional action, the White House has pointed to an executive order Mr. Biden signed in May that includes a plan for a national database of fired police officers to prevent people who have repeatedly committed misconduct from being rehired elsewhere.
The administration has not yet finished developing the tool, even though Mr. Biden directed the Justice Department to finish it by January of this year.
Critics say the database has a serious flaw: Mr. Biden can use his executive authority to require only federal agencies to report their officers to the database. For local departments, like the ones involved in many of the recent incidents of brutality, the reporting is optional.
“We literally don’t have any accountability mechanisms for that local law enforcement,” said Maya Wiley, the chief executive of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “It doesn’t touch that.”
The Justice Department has been deliberating over how much information about police it can include in the database without violating the privacy of officers, according to a senior administration official who requested anonymity to discuss the delay.
Last week, members of the Congressional Black Caucus met with Mr. Biden in the wake of Mr. Nichols’s death and stressed the need for both legislative and executive action to advance police reform. The White House has declined to provide specific details on what additional executive action it can take.
But Mr. Biden’s aides have repeatedly stressed that Congress must take action in order to have meaningful accountability of both federal and local police.
