The Politics Of Police Reform In Connecticut

Two police reform bills have been offered recently, a federal bill spearheaded by U.S. Senator Tim Scott, and a Connecticut state bill, yet in draft form.

The Scott bill was snuffed by Democrats who shamelessly denied “Republicans the 60 votes needed to openly debate a GOP-proposed bill,” according to a piece in The Hill, “If only woke protesters knew how close they were to meaningful police reform.”

The Hill opinion piece, written by Kelsey Bolar, a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum, takes Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi and her brother in arms, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, to task for their intemperate remarks on the Scott bill.

"The Republican bill is really just disastrously weak,” said Blumenthal, a prominent Yahooist in the New Progressive Democrat Party. Pelosi, politically outrageous these days, went a step further. She ‘”unapologetically accused Senate Republicans of ‘trying to get away with murder, actually — the murder of George Floyd.’”

Poor George Floyd was murdered by a policeman soon after charged with second degree murder, but his body has been put to good rhetorical use by Democrats whose eyes are on the prize -- the presidency and a good many contested seats in the U.S. Congress will be up for grabs in November.

The Scott bill Democrats refused to bring up FOR DISCUSSION in the world’s greatest deliberative body, The Hill notes, avoided “focusing on issues such as qualified immunity that divide Republicans and Democrats.” Instead, “Scott focused on reforms that both sides agree on and a vast majority of Americans want. His bill, the JUSTICE Act, disincentivises police chokeholds, collects data on no-knock warrants and makes lynching a federal crime. It uses federal grant dollars as leverage to encourage these reforms, while simultaneously respecting the reality that policing ultimately falls under local and state control.”

Scott went the extra mile, The Hill notes, “to facilitate a conversation, even offering Democrats the ability to consider “at least 20 amendments” to his bill. Of course, it wasn’t enough.” Agreement on the Scott bill – and, perhaps most especially, a public discussion in the world’s greatest deliberative body that would induce common commitment – would have deprived Democrats who shape campaign issues of a most potent charge, usually delivered inferentially, that Republicans are, at bottom, post-Jim Crow racists. Historically, Jim Crow racists and southern slavers were Democrats. 

Scott, a Republican African-American Senator, quickly figured it all out. “Don’t let anyone convince you this was about debates or amendments,” Scott tweeted after the snuff vote. “It’s about politics, and a refusal to find a solution. Because I realized...it wasn’t what was being offered today...it was who was offering it.” Scott stopped short of charging that some of his Democrat opponents might be white, privileged – both Blumenthal and Pelosi are millionaires several times over – progressives who feared competition on the “anti-racist” political stump.  

Here in Connecticut, a state dominated by Democrats, police reform has leapt forward. As a prelude to the bill, Governor Ned Lamont, who has been running the state by executive order in the absence of Coronavirus-sidelined legislative and judicial departments, recently issued one of many executive orders that applied only to Connecticut’s State Police. The order forbade choke-holds and produced a reminder from state police union heads that choke-holds had been discontinued (30) years earlier.

 A Connecticut draft police reform bill has been produced and will be debated in an upcoming special session. Two provisions of the bill need debate. The first debatable provision created an Inspector General’s office that would affect only police functions. What Connecticut really needs is an Inspector General’s office, sufficiently armed with subpoena and prosecution referral powers, that would be able to respond to citizen complaints concerning ANY administrative department in the state.

The Scott bill was characterized by Democrat fire-breather Kamala Harris as “half-assed” – it wasn’t – but the Connecticut bill establishing a considerably restrictive Inspector General function for only one administrative office is… well, a partial and inadequate solution to administrative tyranny.

A provision in Connecticut’s police reform bill abolishing partial immunity is contentious for the following reason: removal of partial immunity would require individual police to pay both lawyers’ fees and judgment costs.

Have the proponents of this provision, one of them a prominent African-American, State Senator Gary Holder-Winfield, considered the real costs involved in the matter of, say, African American police recruitment? What man or woman considering joining a police force anywhere in Connecticut would not pause if they knew that their personal assets might be seriously depleted by frivolous – or even justified – court hearings?

Both these measures suffer from “half-assedness.” If the removal of partial immunity is proper in police departments, why is it not proper for all administrative departments – say, the Attorney General’s Office?

Blumenthal, who won his “white hat” status during his two decade stint as Connecticut’s Attorney General under a flag of partial-immunity, should be able to provide an answer – though, of course, he will never be asked the question.