Two years after a cop murdered George Floyd, President Joe Biden signed an executive order on policing.
The executive order establishes a national database of police misconduct and requires federal law enforcement agencies to use it to screen personnel. It also bans federal officers from using chokeholds “unless deadly force is authorized” and enacts restrictions on no-knock entries.
“This executive order is going to deliver the most significant police reform in decades,” Biden said. “It applies directly, under law, to only 100,000 federal law enforcement officers, all the federal law enforcement officers. And through federal incentives and best practices that are attached to it, we expect the order to have significant impact on state and local law enforcement agencies as well.”
Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, killed Floyd by kneeling on his neck for roughly nine minutes in 2020. Last year, the now-former cop was found guilty of murder.
“I know progress can be slow and frustrating and there’s a concern that the reckoning on race inspired two years ago is beginning to fade,” Biden said. “But acting today, we’re showing what our dear friend, the late John Lewis, congressman, wrote in his final words after his final march for justice in July 2020 — he said, ‘Democracy is not a state. It is an act.’”
Read the White House’s fact sheet for Biden’s executive order here.
