House passes massive police reform bill named for George Floyd
The House passed a massive police reform bill late Wednesday on a party line vote, 219-213. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act is aimed at preventing police misconduct and was named after George Floyd, a Black man who died last summer in Minnesota at the hands of police.
Two Democrats voted against the bill: Reps. Ron Kind of Wisconsin and Jared Golden of Maine. One Republican supported the bill: Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas, but he said later on Twitter that it was an accident and that he had corrected the record to reflect his opposition to the legislation.
The House was supposed to vote on the bill Thursday, but leadership moved up the vote amid new threats aimed at the Capitol.
The bill would establish a national standard for the operation of police departments, mandate data collection on police encounters, reprogram existing funds to invest in transformative community-based policing programs and streamline federal law to prosecute excessive force and establish independent prosecutors for police investigations. The measure would also ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants and requires that deadly force be used only as a last resort and requires officers to employ de-escalation techniques first.
The bill now heads to the Senate.
-ABC News' Mariam Khan