Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. Chairman, first, I would like to thank the chairman and the ranking member for their hard work on this bill.

My amendment would add $10 million to the Community Trust Initiative account for police body-worn cameras, and would take those $10 million from the DEA account for salaries and expenses.

Over the last several months, we have seen more and more encounters between members of our communities and law enforcement that have been too powerful to ignore. We have seen in those recordings instances of police abuse. We have seen instances where police were justified in the use of force. We have even seen instances where police went above and beyond doing their job.

Mr. Chairman, over the last two decades or so, something changed--two things, in fact.

First, we developed a technology so that basically each of us who walks around with a cell phone camera is a social documentarian of the things going on around us.

The second thing that changed is the advent of social media, which allowed people not only to document their experiences, but also to widely distribute what they have documented to this country and to the world. Because of that, we have gotten a better indication of the interaction between law enforcement and members of our community.

In this digital age, we have a responsibility to seek and to know the truth about those encounters. Local police departments, many of them--in fact, 25 percent of the 17,000 police agencies in this country--are already using body cameras. Many more in States all over our Nation are seeking the funds to do this.

The President of the United States asked for $50 million to allow local grants and moneys for local agencies to afford these body cameras and for the storage to make sure that they can keep that evidence.

As you all know, this is a very expensive thing, and many departments have struggled with the funds to afford these things. So in the budget that has been proposed, the amount proposed is not $50 million, but $15 million. This $10 million would simply bring us back up to half of what the President has requested at $25 million.

I will also add that this is very popular among the American people: 86 percent of Americans--Republicans and Democrats, people of every race and ethnicity, in every community across the country--support increased use of body cameras for officers. Even the association of police chiefs in our country supports this also.

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