Police could lose public funds if officers are not trained to best avoid shootings
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US bill would financially penalize police chiefs who don’t order and train officers to do everything possible to avoid open fire during confrontations with suspects
Police departments across the US would lose public funding if they fail to introduce tighter restrictions on when their officers may shoot at suspects under a new law proposed by a Democratic congresswoman.
A bill due to be introduced in the House of Representatives on Thursday by Gwen Moore of Wisconsin would financially penalize any police chiefs who did not order and train their officers to do everything possible to avoid opening fire during confrontations with suspects.
Announcing her proposal, Moore said that “too many mothers have been forced to bury their children” due to unjustified deadly incidents involving police. “Too many young men and women in this country are unreasonably struck down by the very people who swore an oath to protect them,” she said in a statement.
Moore said in an interview that she had been prompted to act by the findings of a Guardian investigation recording every death caused by police in the US, along with a Washington Post project counting fatal shootings by officers.
The Guardian initiative, titled The Counted, recorded more than 1,100 deaths in 2015. “It would be different if this were a rare incident,” Moore said. “But when you get into the 1,000 cases plus that you found, it’s the kind of thing that really makes you think.”
Moore’s proposal is unlikely to advance in the Republican-controlled House, which has declined to take up a series of related initiatives from Democrats amid a wave of protests set off by the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old in August 2014. She said, however, that she was seeking Republican backers for her bill.
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