House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described police chokeholds as “a lynching,” saying she was confident Republican lawmakers will agree to ban them after Democrats introduced a large package of reforms last week, according to a report.
“I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have a ban on chokeholds. Let’s get reasonable,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on CNN on Monday night. “A chokehold is a lynching. That’s a strangulation. It’s a lynching.”
She added: “I think that is almost like the lowest common denominator, but again I will leave it up to my negotiators, because as you know in a negotiation, it’s not what’s in or out, it’s the sum total of the different impact that the legislation will have in justice and policing.”
Pelosi’s comments come as House Democrats and Senate Republicans led by Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) work to advance two competing police reform packages amid national unrest over police brutality and racism that began after the death of George Floyd while in custody of Minneapolis cops.
President Trump is preparing to sign an executive order Tuesday that will create a system for tracking police misconduct, incentivize training and send social workers on some nonviolent police calls.
The police reform bill unveiled by congressional Democrats proposed a system to track problematic officers, and would limit the safeguards in place keeping cops from facing legal or civil action in court.
It would forbid use of chokeholds, ban police from conducting no-knock raids when serving drug warrants, curtail the transfer of surplus military equipment to local and state agencies and lower the threshold to federally prosecute officers if they exhibit a “reckless disregard” for someone’s life.
On Sunday, Scott said the GOP bill would not include increasing officer liability because it would be a “poison pill.”