The Path to Reform

By Tim Scott

Thursday, September 16, 2021

 

One of the most important people in my life is my mom, Frances Scott. As a single mother raising two boys, she worked grueling hours to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. Most days she’d work two shifts at her job as a nurse’s assistant. The long hours put her home late at night.

 

When I was a little kid, one of my dreams was to buy my mom a house with a garage — not as much for the house as for the garage. I wanted her to be able to come home and drive into a place where she was safe. I didn’t want to worry about her late-night walks from her car to an apartment building or through a parking lot. That peace of mind is something I want for every American family.

 

Yet it seems like that sense of safety is farther out of reach than it’s been in recent memory. Three-quarters of Americans believe that violent crime is increasing and that it’s a major problem plaguing our country. The data, unfortunately, support this growing concern.

 

Homicide rates in our country’s largest cities increased by more than 30 percent last year — and rose again by another 25 percent this year. Murder rates shot up by 82 percent in Portland, 72 percent in Minneapolis, 36 percent in Los Angeles, 44 percent in Phoenix, 40 percent in Philadelphia, and 45 percent in New York City, to say nothing of the increase in violent crime more broadly.

 

It’s no coincidence that this alarming spike in violence comes on the heels of the Democratic-led campaign to defund police departments across the country. As someone who grew up in some of the poorest parts of South Carolina, I think defunding the police is one of the most idiotic and immoral ideas I’ve ever heard. Putting poor people in a position to live without security is just plain wrong.

 

Unfortunately, it took a year of avoidable violence for liberals to accept the horrible failure of the defund experiment and begin re-funding the police. After cutting $1 billion from the police budget last year, New York City reinvested $200 million this year. The mayor of Baltimore, who as a city councilman led efforts to cut the police budget by $22 million last year, proposed a $27 million increase. Los Angeles’s mayor proposed an increase of about $50 million after the city cut $150 million from its police department last year.

 

Though liberal politicians are now attempting to distance themselves from the defund movement, we know that the progressive Left remains in the driver’s seat guiding the Democrats’ agenda. The sad reality is that the communities the Democrats claim to be helping in their defund efforts are the very folks most harmed by under-resourced police departments.

 

Take Minneapolis. Last summer, the Minneapolis City Council took several steps toward defunding the city’s police department, and in December, the council voted to reallocate around $8 million away from the police budget. Faced with limited resources and no support, officers resigned in droves. As crime spiked in the absence of police, the city’s poor neighborhoods suffered the most. The Fifth Ward — an area with one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the city — saw a marked increase in homicides, robberies, shootings, and stabbings.

 

It is heartbreaking that this neighborhood, just miles from the site of George Floyd’s murder, became a hotbed of violent crime precipitated by an ill-conceived political reaction to that tragedy.

 

There is no doubt that the video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck caused an awakening among the American people, as many witnessed for the first time the inconsistencies in our justice system. While some folks retreated to their political corners, the newfound national self-awareness that resulted from the tragedy sparked many valuable conversations across the country about how to improve our system of policing. I knew then that this was a moment to harness this wave of opportunity to make a real impact with meaningful reform.

 

To that end, I introduced the JUSTICE Act, a comprehensive police-reform bill aimed at bringing Americans together to solve the serious problems we face. The bill would have incentivized law-enforcement agencies to ban chokeholds, improved data collection and record-keeping on use of force that results in death or serious harm, increased funding for de-escalation training, strengthened penalties for falsifying police reports, and much more.

 

My team and I worked tirelessly to put together a thoughtful response to the tragic deaths of Walter Scott, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, and too many others. We included provisions that were important to both Democrats and Republicans. We got buy-in from members of the law-enforcement community.

 

Despite all that, Senate Democrats blocked my bill from even being debated on the Senate floor. I offered them at least 20 amendments, and they still walked out. As I said at the time: They wanted the conflict to continue in order to win the Senate and White House in 2020 more than they wanted a solution to help the American people.

 

House Democrats have also engaged in political games on this topic. After the Senate unanimously passed my bipartisan anti-lynching legislation in 2018, Nancy Pelosi sat on the Senate bill for more than a year. Then, in what can only be described as political trickery at its worst, House Democrats introduced and passed identical legislation under a different name in order to claim ownership of the issue. Rather than simply passing my bipartisan Senate bill and finally getting anti-lynching legislation across the finish line, Democrats prioritized a political win.

 

After Democrats blocked debate of my JUSTICE Act, I warned my colleagues about the danger of failing to act. It’s the same warning I gave six years ago when Walter Scott was shot in the back by an officer in my hometown of North Charleston, an event that shook our city.

 

Up until that point, our community was inclined to take the word of police officers based on a police report — to assume that it was an accurate depiction of what happened. Bystander video of then-officer Michael Slager shooting Walter Scott in the back quickly disabused folks of that notion. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a thousand pictures. That video led me to the conclusion that we need body-worn cameras on every officer and better reporting on officer-related shootings.

 

From there I started down a long path pursuing reforms — a path I’m still on today. Each time we kick the can down the road, we not only risk more lives lost but also miss crucial opportunities to help mend the eroding relationship between police officers and communities of color.

 

I have not been shy about sharing many of my interactions with the police. I’ve talked about being stopped and questioned at the Capitol, as a senator, even though I was wearing my member pin. I, like many black men, can recall the sting of humiliation that comes with being pulled over simply for driving while black.

 

But for every one of these unfortunate interactions, I’ve had dozens of positive encounters with police officers. The empathy of the officer who helped me when I got into a dangerous car accident as a teen. Going door to door with North Charleston police officers to deliver presents on Christmas Day. Just as the negative interactions hurt my soul, those positive experiences have an impact on the heart.

 

I weigh all my experiences honestly and have used them to come up with solutions that address the issues fairly. Having been on both sides, I’ve come out a champion of officers, the vast majority of whom I know put on their uniforms every day and go to work with a servant’s heart.

 

If more people can arrive at that understanding, I believe we will be able to accomplish meaningful reform. We should not make police officers the antagonists of this story by painting with a broad brush. We need more character-driven men and women to come into these high-pressure, high-crime areas. Moving the conversation away from demonizing officers and instead toward strengthening relationships between officers and the communities they serve means talking about allocating more resources so that departments can recruit more officers, train them better, and create a culture of accountability that ensures the bad officers are rooted out. These are things that both sides want. In fact, more than 80 percent of African Americans have said they want the same level of policing or a higher one.

 

And while the two largest police groups in the country — the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police — railed against House Democrats’ partisan bill, which they said would have a negative impact on policing amid the current crime wave, they’ve affirmed my efforts with Democratic senator Cory Booker to find a compromise solution.

 

For too long the liberal media have convinced folks that there is a binary choice between the police and communities of color. It’s clear that this couldn’t be farther from the truth. An investment in bettering our police is an investment in the communities they serve. You have to help one to help the other.

 

There’s no reason Congress can’t get this done. A number of the issues we’re negotiating are the same things I proposed in my JUSTICE Act, and many enjoy bipartisan support. If we let another year go by without action, I fear the preventable tragedies we’ll have to endure as a nation. If we let another year go by, I fear the continued violence we’ll see in increasingly lawless cities that take their marching orders from a vocal minority of anti-police elites. And most critically, if we let another year go by, I fear we will have failed to seize the opportunity to begin healing our country. That’s why I’m still at the table.