U.S. President Joe Biden has issued a broad executive order that aims to reform federal and local policing on the second anniversary of the death of George Floyd while urging a seemingly immovable Congress to act on police and gun reform.
The order directs all federal agencies to revise their use-of-force policies, create a national registry of federal and local officers fired for misconduct and use grants to encourage state and local police to ban chokeholds and neck restraints unless deadly force is required.
Biden added that it is a measure of what can be done together to heal the very soul of the nation, to address the profound fear trauma, exhaustion particularly Black Americans have experienced for generations, and to channel the pain and outrage into a “rare mark of progress.”