"I DON'T KNOW IF THERE'S ANYTHING YOU CAN DO..."

 After the horrific beating video of 29 year old Tyre Nichols by five police officers was released to the public, Republican House member Jim Jordan spoke about it on "Meet the Press", saying "I don’t know that any law, any training, any reform is going to change...I don’t know if there’s anything you can do to stop the kind of evil we saw in that video.”  While he was understandably disgusted by the violence on the video, his assertion that there's no training or reform that would change things speaks volumes.  It's obvious that the majority of the Republican party don't want any kind of police reforms passed, and will simultaneously call overly violent police bad while opposing passing any kind of changes, much in the same way that they condemn mass shootings without supporting any gun control measures.  Police brutality and mass shootings are two things that the party would rather shrug off than deal with.

To be fair, that's not true of all Republicans; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina tried in 2020 to pass some reforms after the killing of George Floyd, but his bill died in the Senate when Democrats didn't think it went far enough.  There is a chance that this latest tragedy could lead to some reforms, but it will be hard to get them through the Republican House.

And there are so many reforms that should be passed, from banning choke holds to having police stop pulling drivers over for routine moving violations (officers can photograph the offenders license plate and sent the ticket in the mail).  One of the big problems is that over the years, police officers have been getting surplus army material from the military, from rifles and body armor to tanks (!).  Add to that the fact that in cities where violent crime is a problem, special task forces with macho names are formed by the police (the police officers who beat Nichols to death were part of a task force called SCORPION) as a way to show the public that they're serious about fighting crime.  So you're arming these police officers with military weapons that make them feel more like soldiers entering enemy territory than cops and then telling them that they're part of an elite violent crime stopping force, and basically you have a recipe for violent behavior.

After the killing of George Floyd, not only were no serious police reforms passed on a federal level, the early cries of "defund the police" were later turned against progressives by Republicans, and funding for the police often wound up being increased (this in a country that has failed at dealing with our problems with addiction, mental health and homelessness).  Hopefully this time there will be some positive changes made, with perhaps the most important change coming in the training and screening process of the officers.  As Stephen Downing, a retired Los Angeles deputy police chief and former SWAT officer once said,  “The guys who really want to be on the SWAT team are the last people you should be putting on the SWAT team.”