(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) Not only did President Joe Biden once again circumvent Congress and the American people by using an executive order to mandate questionable police reform, he apparently lifted large chunks of the best ideas from legislation that Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., wrote in 2020, and then added rad-left policies that make it harder for police to do their job.
Biden signed his executive order in a ceremony Wednesday memorializing the two-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, a severely flawed individual with a rap sheet that included theft, drug dealing and armed robbery, who was killed at police hands during an altercation.
Biden’s executive order – officially and ostentatiously dubbed the “Executive Order on Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety” — creates a national database to track police misconduct and also mandates all federal agents wear and activate body cameras while on patrol.
The executive order “raises standards, bans chokeholds, restricts no-knock warrants, tightens use-of-force policies to emphasize de-escalation and the duty to intervene to stop another officer from using excessive force, just as occurred — that didn’t occur, but people testified it didn’t occur in George Floyd’s case,” Biden said during the fiat’s signing ceremony.
The executive order, in a nutshell, is a rewrite of Scott’s previously proposed legislation, stripping out the best ideas and adding bad ones.
“After the radical ‘defund the police’ movement helped create the current crime wave, President Biden is pursuing a partisan approach to many of the exact same policy solutions I proposed in the JUSTICE Act just two years ago,” Scott said in a statement.
“The fact is Democrats used a filibuster they call racist to block my reforms that they’re now embracing.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence laid into Biden’s partisan and pandering edict, calling it “police reform that treats cops like criminals.”
“The number one reform we need is to give police officers the resources they need, and then hire prosecutors who actually put criminals in jail rather than let them go,” Pence tweeted.
Two years ago, Democrats blocked the JUSTICE Act, a police reform bill Scott introduced that was co-sponsored by 48 Senate Republicans. A year later, after leftists filibustered the bill, homicides in U.S. cities reached near record highs.
“The JUSTICE Act would have addressed many of the issues included in the executive order,” Scott wrote, and listed some of the key ones:
– Required local police to maintain a system for sharing police disciplinary records
– Increased penalties for all law enforcement officers who intentionally submits a false police report
– Incentivized body-worn camera use for local law enforcement, and provided penalties for non-compliance
– Incentivized the banning of chokeholds by local law enforcement
– Required DoJ to develop training standards on in alternatives to use of force, de-escalation tactics, and techniques for responding to a behavioral health crisis
– Provided grants for improved recruitment and hiring
– Required new best practices on fair and effective policing tactics and procedures
– Tracked use of force or serious bodily injury incident data
“While my proposal added funding to help local law enforcement comply with higher standards, the Democrats’ proposal sets departments up for failure by issuing unfunded federal mandates,” Scott wrote.
“Making it harder for police to do their jobs to the best of their ability should be a nonstarter, yet that’s exactly what the Biden plan does. I’m disappointed that the president who campaigned on unity has once again fallen into the trap of divisive politics.”
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., shared that disappointment, with an added dash of disgust.
We are in the midst of a deadly crime wave and we should be supporting the police.
Joe Biden’s executive order targeting cops is a mistake.
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) May 26, 2022
“Now isn’t the time to tell the public that American law enforcement is ‘systematically racist’ and needs to be further limited in our methods to stop the criminal activity that continues to plague our nation,” Sgt. Betsy Branter Smith, spokesperson for the National Police Association told Fox News.
“It would be most helpful if the president would declare a war on crime so that criminals would once again know the president doesn’t have their back.”
