Tuesday, January 25, 2022

A good post: What can Joe Biden do to help the Black community more?

By Kevin Drum. Excerpt:

So what can Biden do? The American Prospect, in its "Day One Agenda," identified dozens of executive actions Biden could take, a few of which are directly targeted at helping the Black community:

  1. Restart the Obama-era “pattern or practice” investigations into police departments, and broaden the practice to look at prosecutors and other criminal justice actors. DONE.
  2. Restore the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule. DONE.
  3. Re-elevate the CFPB's Office of Fair Lending back into the bureau’s enforcement division. IN PROGRESS.
  4. Reverse Donald Trump's ban on worker training around systemic racism for federal contract workers. DONE.
  5. Direct the Department of Justice to collect public data on police use of force.

The Biden administration has done all of these except the last, which has been a problem ever since it was mandated in the 1994 crime bill. The problem is that it relies on voluntary reporting from local police agencies, and most of them don't feel like volunteering. It's unclear what Biden can do about that.

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