President-Elect Joe Biden has listed “systematic racism” as a mandate that he will fix and announced that within his first 10 days in office plans to enact criminal justice reform that includes a police oversight board.
Fox News reports that Biden announced his plans for the commission in the beginning of June, telling a Philadelphia audience he believed one of the measures that should be enacted would be “to improve oversight and accountability.”
“Looking ahead, in the first 100 days of my presidency, I have committed to creating a national police oversight commission,” he said in the Pennsylvania city. “We need each and every police department in the country to undertake a comprehensive review of their hiring, their training and their de-escalation practices. And the federal government should give them the tools and resources they need to implement reforms.”
Biden gave no further details on what a national police oversight board would entail.
Biden told ABC on October 15th that police de-escalation could include shooting suspects in the leg.
“There’s a lot of things we’ve learned and it takes time, but we can do this,” Biden said. “You can ban chokeholds … you have to teach people how to de-escalate circumstances. … Instead of anybody coming at you and the first thing you do is shoot to kill, you shoot them in the leg.”
Biden’s overall criminal justice agenda also calls for a $300 million infusion into federal community policing grant programs, which would fund, in part, the proposed oversight committee.
But details about the oversight board remain scarce.
While campaigning, Biden said he does not support defunding the police but instead wants to “reimagine policing” — as he touted during the first presidential debate in September.
“What I support is the police having the opportunity to deal with the problems they face,” he said, later adding that local law enforcement “need more assistance, they need — when they show up for a 911 call, to have someone with them as a psychologist, a psychiatrist to keep them from having to use force and be able to talk people down.”
