New York Times: New Rules for Police

 

1. New rules for police

More than 30 states and dozens of large cities have created new rules limiting police tactics. Two common changes: banning neck restraints, like the kind Chauvin used; and requiring police officers to intervene when a fellow officer uses extreme force.

By The New York Times | Source: Campaign Zero

Most of the states and cities passing these laws are run by Democrats, but not all. Kentucky, Indiana and Iowa have done so, too. At the federal level, the House has passed a bill named for Floyd that would limit police use of force and make it easier to prosecute officers for wrongdoing. The Senate has not passed any policing bill.

Christy Lopez of the Innovative Policing Program at Georgetown University calls the changes important but preliminary: “They’re really necessary first steps, but they’re also baby steps,” she said.

2. A focus on racism

The Black Lives Matter movement — which was re-energized by the killings of Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others — has called for changes to much more than policing. The movement has demanded that the country confront its structural racism.

In response, many companies and institutions have promised to act. The National Football League apologized for past behavior. NASCAR banned the Confederate flag from its events. McDonald’s, Amazon and other companies pledged to hire more diverse workforces.

“Non-Black employees joined with their Black colleagues to demand the hiring of more Black people,” The Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr. wrote. “So companies and institutions stopped whining about supposedly bad pipelines and started looking beyond them.”

It’s still unclear how much has changed and how much of the corporate response was public relations.

3. Changes in public opinion

Initially, public sympathy for the Black Lives Matter movement soared. But as with most high-profile political subjects in the 21st-century U.S., opinion soon polarized along partisan lines.

Today, Republican voters are less sympathetic to Black Lives Matter than they were a year ago, the political scientists Jennifer Chudy and Hakeem Jefferson have shown. Support among Democrats remains higher than it was before Floyd’s death but is lower than immediately afterward.