Trump signs order to reduce police use of chokeholds

US President Donald Trump put his own stamp on improving policing by signing an executive order Tuesday to incentivize police departments to adopt best practices and strengthen a national database to track misconduct, as Congress is moving toward legislation but faces a partisan divide.

Among the highlights of the executive action is a prohibition on the use of chokeholds except when a police officer's life is in danger. Chokeholds have become a symbol of police brutality following the May 25 death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, after a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Restrictions on the use of chokeholds are also included in police reform legislative being crafted by Republicans that shares common ground the Democrats' police bill, unveiled last Monday, which also proposes a chokehold ban.

"Reducing crime and raising standards are not opposite goals. They are not mutually exclusive. They work together," Trump said in the White House Rose Garden. "That is why today I'm signing an executive order encouraging police departments nationwide to adopt the highest professional standards to serve their communities."

The executive order encourages de-escalation training, better recruitment and provides more resources for "co-responder programs" that would help pair local police with mental health experts or social workers to address situations.

But Trump did not mention the issue of racism in police forces and calls from activists and Democratic lawmakers for sweeping reform to combat police brutality and racial injustice, which have fueled mass protests across the country over the past few weeks.

Instead, he said "Americans want law and order", and said he strongly opposed the "radical and dangerous" efforts to defund, dismantle or dissolve police departments.

Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, tweeted that if Trump is truly committed to ending police violence, he must support "real, comprehensive" accountability measures to fundamentally change policing culture and invest in Black communities and others hardest hit by overcriminalization.

"It's a piecemeal effort that won't achieve the transformative change needed to heal America," Gupta said on Twitter on Tuesday.

Democratic leaders also called the executive order "modest" and "weak".

"The president's weak executive order falls sadly and seriously short of what is required to combat the epidemic of racial injustice and police brutality that is murdering hundreds of Black Americans," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement Tuesday.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said Tuesday that while the president has finally acknowledged the need for policing reform, one modest executive order will not make up for his years of "inflammatory rhetoric" and policies designed to roll back the progress made in previous years.

The New York Democrat said Congress needs to quickly pass "strong and bold" legislation with provisions that make it easier to hold police officers accountable for abuses and that Trump must commit to signing it into law.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, hailed Trump's executive order, tweeting Tuesday: "These are meaningful solutions, as opposed to Democrats' push to defund the police and stoke anarchy."

The legislation proposed by Democrats and the one being prepared by Republicans may end up having some areas of overlap — for example, both are expected to support the creation of a national database to make it harder for officers accused of misconduct to transfer from one department to another, according to US media reports.

But Democrats' call for eliminating "qualified immunity" for both police and correctional officers was deemed by the White House as "a step too far". As an alternative, Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican who is organizing his party's police reform legislation, is considering a "decertification" process for officers involved in misconduct, The Associated Press reported Tuesday.

On Monday, Senator Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, said that both sides have laid out matters that they consider non-negotiable — a bad omen for a possible deal.

"If that's the way we start out, we probably don't get to a very good conclusion, but maybe as we debate it the non-negotiables get more negotiable," The Washington Post quoted him as saying.

On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that the House Democrats' police reform legislation "is going nowhere in the Senate". He blasted the measure as "typical Democratic overreach".