SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
BY DAVID NAKAMURA,
MARK BERMAN
AND ANNIE LINSKEYThe Biden White House is
struggling to reshape an execu-
tive order on police accountabili-
ty three months after a leaked
draft drew sharp opposition from
law enforcement groups, putting
the initiative at risk at a time
when violent crime is rising and
civil rights groups have expressed
frustration over the pace of re-
form.
Police organizations said they
remain in talks with Biden’s do-
mestic policy adviser, Susan Rice,
and other senior aides. But nearly
two years after the police killings
of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor
and others sparked nationwide
protests and demands for change,
the White House has offered no
timeline for the release of the
order or details of what it might
include.
The parties have reached gen-
eral agreement on some key is-
sues, including creating national
standards for the accreditation of
police departments and a decerti-
fication registry of officers who
commit violations, said Jim Pas-
co, executive director of the Fra-
ternal Order of Police. Those
changes are aimed at boosting
accountability by ensuring basic
policing standards across the
country and limiting the ability of
bad officers to get jobs elsewhere.
But the most contentious ques-
tions remain unresolved — such
as whether the White House
would call for stricter use-of-force
standards or changes to qualified
legal immunity for officers, which
protects them being sued as indi-
viduals over alleged misconduct.
Law enforcement officials also
have opposed efforts to make fed-
eral grant funding for local police
departments contingent on those
departments adopting specified
reforms, Pasco said.
The White House and police
groups acknowledged that the
president cannot change quali-
fied immunity through executive
power. But calling publicly for
changes could help mobilize pub-
lic support and pressure on law-
makers.
The relatively slow-moving
process — more than six months
after President Biden promised to
pursue executive action — comes
as the White House seeks to signal
support for police amid a two-
year surge in gun violence and
homicides, but also to reassure
critics of policing that Biden
wants to improve training and
root out misconduct.
Facing sharp criticism from Re-
publicans on public safety, Biden
proposed $30 billion in new law
enforcement funding in his fiscal
2023 budget request, following a
State of the Union address in
which he pointedly reaffirmed his
rejection of the “defund the po-
lice” movement. Policing groups
have noticed the recent attentive-
ness from Biden, who long boast-
ed close ties to law enforcement.
“This felt more like the Joe
Biden we’ve known for 25 years,”
said Chuck Wexler, executive di-
rector of the Police Executive Re-
search Forum.
At the same time, Biden’s
stance has alarmed civil rights
leaders, who fear that the admin-
istration’s urgency around police
reform is fading as the midterm
elections approach this fall. Since
the collapse in Congress last year
of the George Floyd Justice in
Policing Act — which would have
ended qualified immunity, made
it easier to prosecute officers for
misconduct and limited police
use of force — advocates have
looked to the White House and
the Justice Department to take
bold action.
Maurice Mitchell, national di-
rector of the left-leaning Working
Families Party, said advocates are
“beginning to see the recalibra-
tion politically.”
“We think it would be bad prac-
tice and bad policy if their per-
ceived political vulnerabilities
turn into less of an appetite to
seriously approach these system-
ic issues in our criminal justice
system,” he said.
The White House believes pub-
lic concerns about crime have
complicated the political debate,
according to law enforcement of-
ficials who have spoken with
Biden aides. In June 2020 — at the
height of the protests after Floyd’s
death in police custody — about a
quarter of Americans said they
wanted less money spent on po-
licing, compared with about 31
percent who called for more
spending, according to the Pew
Research Center. By last fall,
those wanting reduced funding
dropped to 15 percent, with 47
percent calling for more, Pew
found.
“He’s trying to do this in the
midst of a 25-year-high spike in
the crime rate,” Pasco said of
Biden’s efforts at police reform.
“And you’re not going to 'civil
rights’ your way out of it.”
In January, police groups and
congressional Republicans de-
nounced a leaked 18-page draft of
the executive order that cited
“systemic racism” within the
criminal justice system. The
White House rushed to do dam-
age control. Pasco said one Biden
aide has suggested that a revised
version of the executive order
could be completed for Biden’s
approval by May, a month that
includes National Police Week
and also marks two years since
Floyd’s death. But Pasco called
that target unlikely.
Biden aides said launching the
order is a priority but offered no
timetable in an interview with
The Washington Post on Wednes-
day, cautioning they are not in the
final stages of presenting a pro-
posal to the president. When
pressed, they declined to say
whether they hoped to get it done
before November’s midterm elec-
tions.
The aides said Biden has been
consistent on the need to both
provide resources to law enforce-
ment and hold officers account-
able for misconduct. And they
pointed to J ustice Department
actions — including pattern-or-
practice investigations into police
departments in Minneapolis,Why Biden can’t get
his police reform
plan off the ground
A spike in crime, officer
opposition h as delayed
the p resident from actingLouisville and Phoenix, and new
limits on the use of chokeholds by
federal officers — as examples of
the administration’s efforts to use
federal power to force reforms.
“These are not small things,”
said Chiraag Bains, deputy direc-
tor of the White House’s domestic
policy council for racial justice
and equity.
Bains cautioned that the presi-
dent’s legal authority to mandate
changes for local policing
through executive power is nar-
row, and said his team is working
to determine what can be done
within those limitations. “That
would include working to estab-
lish practices, standards and
frameworks to reflect the way in
which federal law enforcement
can be a model,” he said. “And
building on and lifting up the best
practices we’ve seen in the field,
often from state and locals. That’s
what an executive order can do.”
Another Biden administration
official, speaking on the condition
of anonymity to discuss private
conversations, acknowledged the
political reality that the public’s
perceptions of rising crime — and
Republican efforts to portray
Democrats as weak in addressing
it — could erode support for
sweeping efforts to limit when
and how police can use force on
the job.
Pasco said he does not know
whether the White House will
eliminate the “systemic racism”
language that sank the draft exec-
utive order. But he said the situa-
tion has created a bind for Biden
aides: Leaving it in would outrage
police, but taking it out would
anger civil rights groups.
In a meeting at the Justice
Department last week with more
than two dozen civil rights lead-
ers, Attorney General Merrick
Garland sought to reassure them,
saying that restoring and main-
taining public trust in law en-
forcement is crucial to building
effective crime prevention strate-
gies.
Last month, Garland appeared
at the conference of National Or-
ganization of Black Law Enforce-
ment Executives in Baton Rouge
to announce a new Justice De-
partment effort to encourage po-
lice departments to enlist in a
“collaborative reform initiative.”
In some respects, however, the
voluntary program reflected the
limits of the federal government’s
power, with the Justice Depart-
ment constrained in the number
of expensive and time-consuming
pattern-or-practice investiga-
tions it can pursue.
“What you’re seeing is what
you’re likely to get,” Damon He-
witt, president of the Lawyers’
Committee for Civil Rights Under
Law, said when asked if Justice
officials outlined any new strate-
gies in the meeting with activists.
The civil rights division, he add-
ed, is “not getting all they want [in
funding] and they’re stretched
thin.”
Wade Henderson, interim
president of the Leadership Con-
ference on Civil and Human
Rights, said activists brought to
Garland’s attention a recent
Washington Post report that
found lawsuits involving police
officers accused of repeated mis-
conduct have resulted in more
than $1.5 billion in settlement
payments.
Henderson praised the Justice
Department’s efforts on police re-
form, including the successful
federal prosecution in February
of three former Minneapolis offi-
cers charged with violating
Floyd’s civil rights. But he added
that “the passage of the George
Floyd bill would have given the
department more tools.”
Justice Department officials
declined to comment on the spe-cifics of the meeting, which was
also attended by Deputy Attorney
General Lisa Monaco and Associ-
ate Attorney General Vanita Gup-
ta, as well as Kristen Clarke, the
head of the civil rights division.
“Trust in law enforcement is a
cornerstone of our work to keep
communities safe,” Gupta said in
a statement. She said the depart-
ment is using funding, training,
technical assistance — as well as
reviewing data and research on
officer accountability and launch-
ing systemic reviews of police de-
partments when necessary — to
help build that trust.
Georgetown University law
professor Christy Lopez, a former
Justice Department official who
led its investigation of the Fergu-
son, Mo., police in 2014 and 2015,
said the atmosphere for police
reform is still fundamentally dif-
ferent from where things stood
before Floyd’s death.
While some cities reversed
course amid rising gun violence,
pushing for more police funding,
“you have many more jurisdic-tions that passed new laws related
to accountability for police or re-
lated to establishing alternatives
to respond to mental health calls,”
Lopez said. “I’ve been doing this
work for a long time, and I’ve
never seen anything like the
breadth and the depth of change
since Floyd.”
Police leaders said they are not
surprised at Biden’s recent “fund
the police” rhetoric, noting that
his budget request last year
also contained a significant in-
crease in law enforcement spend-
ing.
“The president was very clear
that he’s never supported defund-
ing police,” said Orlando Rolón,
the police chief in Orlando. He
acknowledged the need to imple-
ment reforms, but “if there is a
balance to be created, it cannot be
at the sacrifice of putting more
boots on the ground,” Rolón said.
“We have to have the resources to
be proactive.”
Wexler of the Police Executive
Research Forum said proposed
funding boosts for both the mili-tary and police are the strongest
he has seen from a Democratic
administration in decades. “I
don’t think the administration is
in the same place today as when
they started,” Wexler said. “The
ground has shifted. If you talk to a
mayor in any city in this country,
they’re worried about crime and
worried about hiring cops.”
Last October, shortly after the
George Floyd policing bill failed,
Pasco received a surprise call at
home from Biden, who has known
him for years. The two spoke for
about 15 minutes, Pasco said,
parsing the state of reform efforts,
the spike in violent crime and
police morale.
“He was picking through issues
like the encyclopedia. He went
through things from A to Z,” Pasco
recalled. “I’m answering him, and
I’m thinking to myself, ‘You know,
he doesn’t even have anybody on
his staff who has anywhere near
the depth that he has on policing,
or the insight into how police
officers think, and how they react
to things.’ ”MANUEL BALCE CENETA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Biden at a ceremony honoring fallen police officers. Biden aides said he has been consistent on both needing to provide
resources to police and to hold officers accountable for misconduct amid talks of an executive order he hopes to issue on police reform.Washington Post Live
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Monday, Apr. 11 | 1 p.m.
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