House Democrats Vote to Aid Criminals

Late last night, the House of Representatives passed the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020” on a party-line vote, with just two Democrats joining Republicans in opposing the measure. You can read the text of the bill here. It reflects the Democratic Party’s view that there is really no such thing as crime, and the principal threat to our populace comes from violent, depraved police officers. In general, it puts the heavy thumb of the federal government on the scale in favor of criminals, and against law enforcement.

I won’t try to summarize all of the law’s many provisions, but will just note a few points. First, the bill requires an enormous amount of money to be shelled out. To whom will the money go? As always, the Democrats are assiduous in rewarding their constituencies. This is the bill’s definition of “Community-Based Organizations” to which funding will flow:

The term “community-based organization” means a grassroots organization that monitors the issue of police misconduct and that has a local or national presence and membership, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), UnidosUS, the National Urban League, the National Congress of American Indians, or the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium (NAPALC).

Second, the bill requires the collection of an enormous amount of data by state and local law enforcement agencies. The data, naturally, are organized “by race, ethnicity, age, and gender of the officers of the agency and of members of the public involved in the practice.” More than ever, racial nose-counting will be the order of the day.

Third, one of the act’s most pernicious features is its declaration that any “disparity” in law enforcement constitutes “racial profiling,” and therefore is banned:

SEC. 311. PROHIBITION.

No law enforcement agent or law enforcement agency shall engage in racial profiling.
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(c) Nature Of Proof.—Proof that the routine or spontaneous investigatory activities of law enforcement agents [Ed.: E.g., traffic stops] in a jurisdiction have had a disparate impact on individuals with a particular characteristic described in section 302(6) shall constitute prima facie evidence of a violation of this part.

So if police officers and highway patrolmen don’t stop exact quotas of each racial group for speeding, it constitutes “racial profiling” and is prohibited. There is voluminous evidence that some ethnic groups commit traffic violations and other offenses at substantially greater rates than other ethnic groups, so police officers will have to let some traffic offenses, etc., go so they can meet their quotas. The analogy to the Democrats’ destruction of school discipline through racial quotas is obvious. The effect will be a more dangerous America.

But the Democrats don’t care about that. When it comes to cops vs. robbers, they are on the side of the robbers.

This atrocity will become law unless we are saved by Joe Manchin or, perhaps, Kyrsten Sinema. This is how far gone the Democratic Party is.

A final observation: the bill’s name, the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020,” is ironic in view of the fact that, based on the evidence we now have, the only thing police officers did in regard to George Floyd was to try to save his life by calling an ambulance after Floyd had, in effect, committed suicide with an overdose of fentanyl. But reality and Nancy Pelosi have little in common.

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