Legislation introduced to Congress on Thursday would create a new national standard for when police officers can use deadly force and require police academies to teach officers de-escalation techniques — the latest in a series of proposals to be introduced during the current national conversation on police reform.
The bill, called the Preventing Tragedies between Police and Communities Act of 2016, is authored by Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., who has been among the most outspoken members of Congress in calling federal action to curb the number of police killings.
“We want our officers using force really that proportional to the situation,” Moore said in an interview on Wednesday. “This is about giving police officers additional training assets with regard to encounters that don’t necessarily have to end up with a use of deadly force.”
The legislation is the latest in a flurry of measures introduced in the 21 months since the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which prompted protests and riots and sparked a national examination of police use of force.
Moore’s proposal targets police training and would require American police officers to be trained in non-lethal force, to go through crisis intervention training to help them deal with the mentally ill, and to use the lowest level of force possible when responding to a threat. If passed, local police departments would have one year to comply with the new training standards or would face reductions in federal grant money.
Those standards are drawn from a recent report by the Police Executive Research Forum, an influential Washington-based policing policy think tank that has been among the leading advocates for policing reform since the unrest in Ferguson and in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. Earlier this year, PERF convened a gathering of policing officials at which it proposed adopting new training standards nationwide, and later issued a report with those recommendations.
But PERFs report has been controversial in policing circles, with some police trainers and chiefs arguing that it amounts to “political correctness” and that the proposed reforms could cause officers to second guess themselves in the face of deadly threats. In a joint statement issued earlier this year, the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Fraternal Order of Police denounced the proposals.