Republicans oppose police reforms because they support the police targeting Black Americans
This is the only conclusion left
We are at the point where we must ask this blunt question: Do Republicans actually support the brutal and discriminatory way our criminal justice treats Black Americans?
How else can you explain the comments of House Judiciary chair Jim Jordan—a man who should rightfully be on trial for his role in Trump’s coup attempt— on “Meet The Press” Sunday in response to the gruesome murder of Tyre Nichols?! When Jordan was asked about supporting legislation to reform the police, he responded: “I don’t know that there’s any law that can stop that evil that we saw.” Later Jordan added, “I don’t know that any law, any training, any reform is going to change” what happened to Nichols.
Jordan even took a shot at Democrats who are championing legislation to prevent a repeat of what we saw with Mr. Nichols, saying “The Democrats always think that it’s a new law that’s going to fix something that terrible.” He continued, as Republicans we know “no new law is going to do that.”
Really?! So, a leading House Republican is saying we should just accept what we are seeing because laws won’t impact the conduct of bad people. Of course, new laws will change future conduct—it’s why we punish people for committing crimes. The goal is to deter people from repeating the same behavior in the future.
But’s it’s deeper than just that. On some level we have to accept that there are Republicans who either are truly not troubled by police misconduct directed at Black Americans or worse, they support it.
The reality is Jordan’s view is the mainstream Republican philosophy. Look at what happened to efforts to address police misconduct by way of federal legislation after George Floyd’s brutal murder in 2020. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was drafted which would have implemented widespread police reforms from ending qualified immunity for police officers to creating a nationwide police misconduct registry to help hold problematic officers accountable.
This legislation passed the House in March 2021 when Democrats controlled the chamber by a vote of 220-212. How many Republicans supported it? Zero. And when it was sent to the Senate, the proposed legislation died given no Republicans would support it and 10 were needed to overcome the filibuster.
But this issue is bigger than just police reform. This is about GOP leaders and the base apparently not wanting to address the unjust way our policing and criminal justice system has consistently treated Black Americans.
Here are some examples of the racial disparity in our criminal justice system that ranges from being pulled over by the police to sentencing to even being killed:
-Pulled over by police: The Stanford Open Policing Project examined data over a range of years and found officers generally stop black drivers at higher rates than white drivers. Also in nearly every jurisdiction they found that black and Hispanic drivers are searched more often than white drivers. Add to that, data from 2017 through 2020 analyzed by the NAACP found that Black men are "five times more likely to be stopped without just cause than a white person." And from there, Black people in numerous studies are found far more likely to receive a ticket or be charged with a crime than white people.
-Bail: As the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative laid out, “Black and brown defendants are at least 10 to 25 percent more likely than white defendants to be detained pretrial or to have to pay money bail.” The initiative also found that “Black and brown defendants receive bail amounts that are twice as high as bail set for white defendants.”
Sentencing: A 2017 study from the United States Sentencing Commission found that Black men who commit the same crimes as white men receive federal prison sentences on average “nearly 20 percent longer.” These disparities were found “after controlling for a wide variety of sentencing factors,” including prior criminal history.
Killed by police: Black Americans are 3.23 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police, according to a study by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
That’s just a sample of the racial disparity in our criminal justice system. You can find even more examples in this Washington Post detailed report.
What you are seeing with this data is called “systemic racism.” It’s not “a few bad apples” like the right loves to say. Rather, clearly the tree is infected. That is why to correct this you need sweeping legislation to address the racism embedded in our criminal justice institutions.
There’s zero doubt that GOP elected officials know this data. But they refuse to act. In fact, worse, they lie that there is no such thing as “systemic racism”—which means there’s no need for reforms.
Ron DeSantis has called the idea there is systemic racism embedded in our institutions "a bunch of horse manure.” I can assure you that DeSantis -a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law school—knows the truth.
Same with Mike Pence who while recently campaigning in New Hampshire for his expected 2024 run for president declared, “America is not a racist country ... it is past time for America to discard the left-wing myth of systemic racism.” So, per Pence, all the data I cited above is the Democrats new “hoax.”
Even Senator Tim Scott, the only Black Republican Senator, denies reality despite his own personal experiences with the police. As Scott has stated, he was pulled over “seven times in a single year,” which he dubbed as, “driving while Black." Scott also shared in 2021, "I've been stopped several times in the last three years in the Capitol and on the streets throughout the country.”
What Scott was describing is what systemic racism looks like. It’s not a few bad apples, it’s the police pulling over a Black man driving a nice car in various parts of the country for no valid reason. But—and there’s always a bit—Scott went on Fox News in 2021 where he told the white viewers that “America has overcome systematic racism.”
Why the denial of reality? Simple, to make the GOP base happy. Polls show us that the GOP base doesn’t believe there is systemic racism. Just one example is a 2021 Pew Poll that asked if our institutions need to be reformed because they are “fundamentally biased” against minorities. Seventy four percent of Democrats responded that “a lot more needs to be done to achieve racial equality” within our institutions.
What percentage of Republicans said the same? Twenty two percent. Yep, only one in five Republicans see the racial disparity within our criminal justice system and believe much more needs to be done to correct it.
Do these Republicans not want to see sweeping changes because they truly don’t get the racial disparity? Years ago, that was plausible. Today it’s not. And clearly the elected officials like DeSantis and Pence know the truth.
At this point, it’s fair to say that Republicans don’t want to reform policing—or the criminal justice system overall--because they support the way it unfairly treats Black Americans. Perhaps they believe the racism within the system benefits them. Maybe they are just racist. But whatever the reason, this tells you why today’s GOP will never support reforms that address systemic racism.
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