Joe Biden has called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, moments after shocking police video was released showing an Illinois officer fatally shooting Sonya Massey after she called police fearing a home intruder.
In his first public statement since dropping his bid for re-election, Biden said the shooting of Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman, by white Sangamon county sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson, in her home in Springfield, after a dispute over a pot of boiling water, “reminds us that all too often Black Americans face fears for their safety in ways many of the rest of us do not”.
Biden, who is recovering from Covid at his home in Delaware, said Massey, “a beloved mother, friend, daughter and young Black woman … should be alive today”.
The Republican candidate is a real policing iconoclast
so that makes it okay for the Democrats to sit on it because that is way better than actively participating?
think we went through this with Germany already not just Nazis but the quiet people in power who never spoke up
No Democrats are “sitting on it”. They passed a House bill in 2020 which Senate Republicans killed. They passed another in 2021 which died over disputes about qualified immunity and because Republicans objected to a national police misconduct database. Then Republicans took the House in 2022 and obviously weren’t going to pass it again.
Stop blaming Democrats for Republican intransigence.
I haven’t so much as heard them talk about the issue in I don’t even know how long. (Aside from Biden saying we should give cops MORE funding) But now, 3ish months out from the election…
Should they stop trying to do things as they approach an election?
What are they trying to do? I see a soundbite. An empty platitude. D doesn’t have the votes. No one, including Biden, thinks this bill will now get passed because he made this statement.
And them saying it last month, six months ago, 12 months ago, or 18 months ago would have been different how?
The person you’re replying to is a contrarian troll. No matter what you say, they’re gonna blame Democrats and not Republicans. Because they are a troll. stop, feeding the troll.
so Chinese dissidents or any political dissident such as Martin Luther King Jr or Jewish people in Germany during the Nazi Reign are by this definition contrarian trolls that denounced the majority persuasion?
It would have been pretty hard for me to call it empty platitudes for votes, aside from the 1 month ago window. But what would really cook my goose would be if they’d said it 18 months, 12 months, 6 months, 1 month, 3 months, 9 months and a shitload of other times ago. The way you message on issues that matter to you.
Funny, I don’t remember bringing up Republicans at all. I already expect nothing good from them.
Guess I should excuse any sort of inaction from Dems then. Good point!
It’s just what we’re stuck with until we get rid of first past the post
How shall we do that?
Call or write your reps and tell them you want it; more specifically there is the proposed Fair Representation Act which looks pretty good on paper to me. There’s also a non profit lobbying group called FairVote that is seeking Ranked Choice voting in federal and state elections.
But I’m poor
I don’t see how that’s an impediment to contacting your reps
It’s an impediment to them caring
They don’t ask for your income when you call. Also, defeatism is the status quo’s best friend. It takes a lot of noise and work to move the needle.
You are talking about voting. I’m already voting for them. Aren’t I at least allowed to criticize them while also voting for them, or is that a bridge too far?
Democrats tried to pass the GFJPA in 2020, then again in 2021, and then Republicans took the House. All three times it was blocked by Republicans.
Which Republicans made Biden say this? https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-fund-the-police-biden-says-at-state-of-the-union
‘Fund them with resources and training’ is controversial to you?
It is when it’s not paired with calls for oversight regarding how that training is used and specific results of said training.
I’m starting to sympathize with the 2A folks who are like “why more gun laws when we don’t enforce the ones we have” but in a different way.
What training (using only this singular current example) would you say should be required for an officer of the law to know he shouldn’t shoot a woman in the face with her hands up from 10 + feet away when he was under no threat? Do you need training to know that’s wrong? Training beyond what every single person given state power to kill should receive at an absolute minimum?
All that heartache and pain, and the final net result was Biden calling for more police funding.
And before you get into your don’t blame dems thing again, I routinely post the meme below for how unreasonable people are about blaming Democrats. I get it.
But you’ll forgive me for being a bit cynical when I hear not a damn peep from anyone in the administration about police reform all the way from “Biden says fund the police” to “Hey it’s 3 months before the election, cops killed someone again (which has happened many, many times since then), so NOW we’ve got these platitudes trickling out again.”
I get it, here’s the evergreen infographic I post over and over that makes your exact point. But damn I’d like some indication of “give a shit” other than when there’s an election close by.
I’m not claiming to know what kind of training would help, just that “train them better” isn’t a particularly controversial statement. I’m also not arguing against police reform, which is desperately needed. I’m simply observing that Republicans are to blame for the GFJPA repeatedly not advancing in Congress. Were there a more significant Democratic majority in Congress, their intransigence would be irrelevant and reform would have already been implemented. Voters simply didn’t send that sizeable majority to DC.
You are. I just worry about what one sided criticism might bring for us in November, and I say that while completely agreeing with you that policing reform is needed.
They could have avoided the criticism by skipping the empty platitude that triggered it. But a sincere thank you for acknowledging that it’s OK to criticize them. (though I’m unsure what one-sided means in this context)