House Passes Package of Policing Bills After Democrat Infighting

The House of Representatives on Sept. 22 passed a Democrat-sponsored package of policing bills amid intraparty divisions on the issue due to some progressives’ objections.

The bills—which observers have pegged as a last-minute attempt by Democrats to beef up their public safety credentials amid GOP accusations of being “soft-on-crime”—faced drawn out negotiations between moderates and progressives.

Moderate Democrats hope that the package will help them fight off GOP criticism of violent crime rates rising across the United States. But some progressive Democrats have been hesitant to accept the package without stricter regulations on local police departments. Such regulations, in turn, ran the risk of souring GOP lawmakers on the proposals.

The final bill package consists of four elements.

One of the four bills, sponsored by moderate Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), furnishes federal grants to local police departments with fewer than 125 officers. Another, sponsored by Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), provides targeted grants to communities with unusually high rates of criminal violence. The third bill in the package, this one sponsored by Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), achieves a longtime Democrat goal of incentivizing the use of mental health officials to respond to situations instead of police officers, whenever feasible. The final bill of the bunch, put forward by Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), provides funding for enhanced investigative technologies to solve unsolved cases with a focus on gun violence cases.

Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), who heads the Congressional Black Caucus and led negotiations between the disparate elements of the party, applauded the final package.

“The American people have been asking for mental health—we’re giving them that. The American people have been asking for training and making sure that we’re looking at the victims—we’re giving them that. They’ve been asking us to break this cycle of violence—we’re giving them that,” Beatty told reporters. “They have been asking us

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