This archive report was first published on 17 June 2020.
US President Donald Trump issued an executive order on June 16, 2020, to improve policing in the United States, calling for a ban on dangerous choke holds. However, the order stopped short of demands made at nationwide protests against racism and police brutality.
The president has limited power over policing, which is run mostly at a state and local level. Trump said he would use access to federal funding grants as leverage to persuade departments to adopt the highest professional standards.
His executive order encourages de-escalation training, better recruitment, sharing of data on police who have bad records, and money to support police in complicated duties related to people with mental or drug issues.
Trump's proposals include ending choke holds 'except if an officer's life is at risk,' he said. Critics, including Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, derided his efforts, saying the order falls short of what is required to combat the epidemic of racial injustice and police brutality.
Trump began by announcing he'd just met in private with families of several black people killed in encounters with the police. However, his choice to keep the televised audience overwhelmingly white, male, and focused on law enforcement representatives reinforced his main message.
Only a 'very tiny' number of police commit wrongdoing, Trump said. Democrats and civil rights groups say that full-scale rethinking of police culture, and even cuts in police funding, are needed to bring necessary change.
The Black Lives Matter movement has spun off into attacks by activists against statues commemorating figures from colonial and slavery eras. Trump has struck a hardline tone throughout the tense period, sparking uproar even from his own party with his warning that he could send federal troops to cities unable to control the crowds.
Trump's executive order comes after the death of George Floyd, an African-American man, in Minneapolis, and the death of Rayshard Brooks, another African American, in Atlanta, Georgia.
