Justice in Policing Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I want to thank my friends, Kamala Harris from California and Cory Booker from New Jersey, for leading us in this fight for so many years.
I remember well when I first went to work for the city and county of Denver. One of the first tragedies that we had in the city at that time was the shooting of a young man named Paul Childs in Park Hill by police under circumstances that should never have happened. That was almost 20 years ago, but these headlines haven't stopped. If anything, matters have gotten worse.
As the country has grappled with the pandemic over the last few months, I heard a lot of people talk about how it has revealed a profound sense of inequality in our country, how it has exposed all this injustice in the United States of America.
We should not have needed a pandemic to expose the injustice that exists in the United Stated of America. It should not have taken a pandemic to alert people to the injustice in our country. If you have been paying any attention, if you have listened at all to the Black voices in the United States of America, then you know these injustices have been with us for generations.
In the case of our law enforcement system, they have literally had life-and-death consequences for Black Americans, and it just keeps happening. One reason it keeps happening--the one reason it happened to Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, or George Floyd--is that what happened to them would never happen to my three daughters; what happened to them would never happen to me. It has never occurred to me once, when I am walking around my neighborhood in Denver, that what happened to them could happen to me or my children. That is what is meant, in part, by White privilege--a privilege that almost everybody in this Chamber enjoys.
I think we can never accept that we live in a country where one group of people is less safe than another for no reason other than the color of their skin. We have to refuse to accept it, but that is the country in which we live.
We have to acknowledge, finally, what Kamala Harris and Cory Booker and others have been telling us, which is that our criminal justice system in this country is broken.
Our long history of unequal treatment of poor and minority criminal offenders--especially Black Americans--has evolved into a system of mass incarceration unlike that of any other developed democracy. A network of dystopian, privatized prison spreads across the land to house people who, in many cases, shouldn't even be behind bars, who were convicted for infractions relating to things that are legal in the State of Colorado today.
According to Ta-Nehisi Coates' definitive article on the subject of the U.S. mass incarceration, our country accounts for less than 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of those who are incarcerated. Our closest competitor--and it is hard to find one--is Russia, a virtual police state.
In our country, there is nothing equal about who is incarcerated. Black males between the ages of 20 and 39 are incarcerated at a rate 10 times the rate of their White peers. Every one of these issues needs to be reexamined and formed not by ideology but by pragmatism and, most important, the moral commandments of a just society. That is what the patriotic Americans in our streets in downtowns demand. They are not calling for one more commission. They are not calling for one more study. They are calling for real reform. That is what people mean when they say: This moment calls for real reform. That is what the people are saying in the streets.
With respect to my colleagues on the other side, the proposal Senator McConnell has put forward doesn't come close to meeting that test. His bill, his proposal, which is meant to paper this over and get through to another chapter, not address the issue--his bill still allows the use of choke holds, the same choke holds that suffocated the life from Eric Garner. It doesn't ban no-knock warrants, the same practice that led police to break down Breonna Taylor's door and shoot her eight times in her own apartment. It doesn't make it easier for families like the family of George Floyd to seek justice when their loved ones have been victimized by police brutality. It doesn't even ban racial profiling. There is virtually nothing in this bill to respond to the families calling for justice or to save lives from police practices that have no place in America in the year 2020.
This is not a time for half measures, for one more attempt to use talking points and legislative tricks to make it seem like we are doing something when we are not. The idea that the country isn't ready for a comprehensive approach is not true.
I will yield to my colleague from Connecticut in just a minute.
Last week in Colorado--my State, a Western State, a purple State--we became the first State in America to pass a sweeping police accountability bill into law. It is almost exactly like the one we have proposed here. We passed that bill 52 to 13 in the State House and 32 to 2 in the Senate--32 to 2. Only two Republicans in the Senate voted against that bill. Every single Democrat voted for that bill. And that is Colorado, out in the middle of the country. It sets a standard for what we need to do in Washington, which is to pass the Justice in Policing Act that Senator Harris and Senator Booker have put forward because we will never heal as a nation, as a country, unless we confront and dismantle the systemic injustice and the systemic racism that still plagues America, running as it does in a straight line from slavery to Jim Crow, to the redlining of our housing and banking system, to the mass incarceration that we have, to the prisons that Ta- Nehisi Coates refers to as ``The Gray Wastes.''
As I said on the floor the other day, anyone who studied the history of our democracy knows how tough it is to make progress. The struggle has always been a battle from the very beginning of our founding, between our highest ideals and our worst instincts as a country. More often than not, the fulcrum of that battle from the founding until today has been race. Progress on these lines has never been easy. It has never come easy.
Among us are still people whose politics are aimed at stripping some citizens of their rights and opportunity, who despise pluralism, who succumb to fearful hatreds like racism or who care nothing for anyone but themselves. Their presence means that the rest of us, most of us, who Martin Luther King, Jr., called the great decent majority, must share an even deeper understanding of our patriotic obligation to our fellow Americans and to our Republic. Right now, that obligation means doing everything in our power to answer the call of Americans in our streets and downtowns, from DC to Denver, and beyond, who are calling for an America where no one is denied protection of the law or justice or their own life because of the color of their skin.
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