BACKGROUND PRESS CALL BY SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS ON THE PRESIDENT’S EXECUTIVE ORDER REGARDING POLICE REFORM

Office of the Press Secretary FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 15, 2020

BACKGROUND PRESS CALL BY SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS ON THE PRESIDENT’S EXECUTIVE ORDER REGARDING POLICE REFORM Via Teleconference   5:34 P.M. EDT      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Thank you so much.  I do appreciate it.  Good afternoon, everybody.  Thanks so much for taking the time to join this background briefing regarding the Executive Order on Policing Reform.      The ground rules are as follows: The information on the call is on background and can be attributable to a senior administration official, and the content is embargoed until the conclusion of the call.      Today’s participants are [senior administration officials].  As a reminder, by participating on the call, you are agreeing to the ground rules I’ve set forth.      I appreciate you all being on.  And, with that, I’ll turn the call over to [senior administration official].      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Thank you, [senior administration official], and thank you all for joining us.      First of all, I want to thank everyone for being here.  Tomorrow, we plan to do an executive order that the President has been working on for the last couple of weeks.  This is not a new thing.  We started our police commission a couple of months ago in the beginning of the year after we did criminal justice reform.      The President is a president of action and I’ll go through what this executive order is going to be talking about.      We developed this by talk- -- working very closely with law enforcement professionals and their representatives, as well as with families of people who were killed by law enforcement and also their representatives.      The goal of this is to bring police closer together with the communities.  We’re not looking to defund the police; we’re looking to invest more and incentivize best practices.          The executive order has three main components to it.  The first component is going to be about -- it’s going to be about creating credentialing and certification.  We’re looking to incentivize best practices.  There are a lot of great standards for use of force throughout the country.  However, a lot of the police departments that have had problems are not using the most modern standard.  Whether you look at Minneapolis or if you look at Ferguson or if you look at Baltimore, a lot of their training materials and standards are outdated, and this is something that we want to incentivize people to get certified on their practices and hopefully that will encourage better training and action.      The next thing is going to be about information sharing.  That gives us the ability to track people who have excessive use of force complaints so that people can’t leave one law enforcement department and then get hired at another.  There should be a place for people to know about people’s backgrounds so we can keep bad cops out.  And nobody hates bad cops more than good cops.  And we want to make sure that we can track that and take action.      The last part, which is also going to be critical, is with regards to mental health and homelessness and addiction.  We want to be able to have co-responder programs where we’re going to incentivize.  A lot of the work that police officers are doing today deals with medical issues and homelessness.  And we want to make sure that police officers can do policing and that they can implement best practices throughout the country to figure out how they can deal with a lot of the other issues that come up along the way.      We think that this will be something that both the law enforcement community, as well as the community advocates have been asking for.  This is something that our law enforcement commission, the Attorney General, and all the people that we’ve been talking to feel like is a very necessary development now in law enforcement.      So we think that this is steps that will actually make a big difference.  And again, the President is going to call on Congress to hopefully pass legislation that can make a difference.  And we’re looking forward to tomorrow and for the President to have the opportunity to have a discussion where he has both police officers and police officer representatives in the room with families of people who were killed by police officers, to have the discussion that the country needs to have so that we can turn the anger in the country right now into action and hopefully bring some unification and some healing.      I will say that this President has been about solutions.  A  lot of the President’s policies have been addressed towards solving the problems in the inner cities, whether it’s for advocating better schools, whether it’s trying to bring access to capital and more investment into the poorest areas through Opportunity Zones, bringing more money to higher education in historically black colleges, or even addressing criminal justice reform, which he was able to do with the historic passage of the FIRST STEP Act and a lot of the work we’ve done on second chance hiring.       The President promised, when he ran for office, to work hard for the forgotten men and women of this country.  And his actions today, his policy platform, have achieved great results.  And this is just another example of how, working with law enforcement, the President has been able to make adjustments that are able to hopefully bring the country forward and bring law enforcement and communities closer together by promoting practices that are state of art for community policing.      I’ll pass it over to [senior administration official].  Maybe you want to finish up on that.      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Sure.  Thanks so much.  And so, this reform is very impactful because it’s all focused on community policing.  We know that, in certain areas, the police have been disincentivized to stay in the car and not walk the beat, and that’s made communities less safe.  And so what we want to do is thread the needle on having more cops, community police, but at the same time, build trust with the community.  And that’s what this reform effort is all focused on.      And so we had the opportunity to not only work with various different police groups, but several faith leaders and groups that represent families.      And so, one of the big reforms that everyone agrees on and that we think is going to be revolutionary in the way we do policing is the creation of co-respondent services, which focuses on bringing on social workers who will go on a response with police for nonviolent response calls, specifically focused on mental health, drug addiction, as well as homelessness issues.      We find that law enforcement finds themselves dealing with these issues more often than not.  And in many cases, they're not the best one to respond to these type of efforts.  And so though we have a database, we also made sure that this database system accounted for privacy and due process for those officers because we want to be fair in how we set up this system.  But again, as my colleague reiterated, most good cops -- all good cops, the biggest thing they hate is bad cops.  You know, and so they want to be able to have a system that they can trust and that no one can go around the system.      And then we also really want to focus on retention and recruitment -- specifically, recruiting people from the communities that they live in.  We want police officers who are in the police department to be a part of their community.  And what better way than recruit directly from that community?      And so we look forward to tomorrow's event.  And I'll sit back for any questions.      Q    Hey, this is Franco Ordoñez with NPR.  Thank you so much for doing this.  I had a question about unions and accountability.  One of the concerns was how difficult it is to have accountability for officers.  Derek Chauvin of Minneapolis, he had, I understand, 17 number of complaints against him.  How does this address the issue of accountability, particularly what some say are roadblocks from unions -- police unions?      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  So there's a lot of accountability in the credentialing process.  Many of these local accountability (inaudible) is going to be put on local mayors who maybe not take the time to get their police department credentialed.  And so we're going to really need them to hold accountability for their local law department, local laws.      I mean, there's so many different police departments around the country that could've done a better job if they just took the time on the front end with doing the credentialing.  We're, of course, going to put some incentive in place by rewarding police officers and police departments that do the right thing.  But we think there is certainly some accountability from local leaders to help us do this.      You know, the federal government can only do so much, so we do need local partnerships.  But we're going to do all we can to use our platform to bring police and communities together.      Q    Hey there, it's Michael Moates.  I'm with the America First Project.  I just wanted to ask you: If you look at the numbers from the different leadership across, you know, Atlanta, Seattle, Minneapolis, obviously there is a lot of Democratic leadership there.  Is there going to be withholding of grants?  Are you all looking other options of discipline for those who don’t comply?      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  What we found is prioritizing funding really changes the way that people go around seeking funding from the federal government.  And so you don’t necessarily have to demonize them or withdraw funds, but if you create an equal system based off of best practices, there's going to be more so a race to create the best application to get access to the funding.  And that’s usually how it works, which is why we're prioritizing the funding, rather than trying to do anything that would seem like we're trying to defund police departments.      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  And what we're finding is that there is actually a fairly good ecosystem of standards and training behaviors.  And, you know, some places do it great and others less sub-par.  And, you know, what we want to be doing is incentivizing people to take on those best standards, and improve their training, and do the retention of good officers.  And by doing that, that will be the way that you can hopefully start doing it.      But you're never going to solve this problem by demonizing the police.  You have to solve this problem by working with law enforcement and with the police to make progress together.  And there's a lot of willingness, and I believe that this executive order will have the support of all the major federal law enforcement groups in a very, very positive way.      Q    Hi, it's Andrew Feinberg with Breakfast Media.  Thanks for doing the call.  I have two questions.  Shortly -- shortly after the President took office, in 2017, the DOJ's COPS Office stopped doing investigations and publishing reports into problems in local departments.  And shortly before Jeff Sessions resigned as Attorney General, he issued a memorandum directing the Civil Rights Division to stop doing pattern-and-practice investigations and entering into consent decrees -- making it harder to enter into consent decrees with police departments to stop civil rights abuses.      Those types of investigations and consent decrees were widely considered to be some of the strongest tools in the DOJ's toolbox for dealing with abuse and misconduct in local police departments.  Would the President consider directing the Attorney General to rescind that memorandum and allow these investigations and practices to start again?  And if not, why not?      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  We’re focused on bringing the police and the community together.  We think going in a certain direction may dis-incentivize police from going to high-crime areas.  You can look at some localities, like Baltimore, that had consent decrees.  And now, plenty of neighborhoods in Baltimore are being victimized, and crime is on the rise because police officers are afraid to do their job because there is no protection for police officers.      I think we have to think about this: Most people want to be able to call the police if they need them.  Just because some bad apples don’t perform their job, that doesn’t mean you throw out the baby with the bath water.      And so what we’re trying to do is create a system which brings police and community together and focuses on public safety.  With that public safety narrative, we have less of these bad interactions and more of the positive ones.  And so that’s what we focused on.      Q    Yes, hi, this is Carrie Sheffield with JusttheNews.com.  I had a question about, specifically, what the executive order is going to include in terms of what pieces might there be that need to be passed through legislation.  And, I guess, specifically, the three components that you mentioned, are these all going to be through DOJ?  What's the legal mechanism for how these will be enforced?  And then, what, if anything, is not going to be included, in terms of executive power and your just making of the suggestion?  If you could differentiate those two.      And then, a quick question for [senior administration official].  You mentioned that there are a lot of officers who are not from the community.  Is there any steps -- or evidence to say that this is a problem or it is more common, that it is -- there’s results, in terms of seeing that it’s better to have officers from the community?      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Yeah, let me start by saying that a lot of the law enforcement is local.  Right?  And so, at the federal level, there are certain things that we can impact and there are certain things we can't impact.  And so what we've been trying to do with this executive order is work with law enforcement to try to set some guiding principles and incentivize best behavior at the local level.      We've -- you know, we launched the first -- you know, we launched a commission earlier this year, right after we did criminal justice reform, to study improvements with modern technology and what could be done in policing now throughout the country.      Once this is signed, the Attorney General will then take the principles from the President and work to turn that into specific guidance.  And then also, Congress is going to need to look at it, and we’ll call on them to work on different areas to see if they can both provide funding and legislation to put some of these programs into place.      And do you want to --      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Yeah.  I was just going to -- I can just add to that, that there is a lot of -- here that certainly can be put into statutory law.  But the President wanted to act.  He didn’t want to have to wait on Congress to act on it this issue, because bringing the community together now is extremely important, specifically for public safety.  We’re speaking on behalf of many communities that want more law enforcement there to help protect them and keep them safe.      And so we’re always going to -- the first business of the President is protect people.  We’re always going to make sure that happens.      Insofar as the stats on community policing, that comes from my experience, but a number of community advocates have asked for more of that and also the police.  And so that’s an area where everyone has had common ground.      Q    Hi, this is Jeff Mason with Reuters.  Thanks, everybody.  The question I have, just as I'm thinking about how to write about this, is: What exactly -- how exactly does the executive order fulfill these objectives that you're talking about?  When you say you want to incentivize best practices and information sharing, and the piece about mental health, does that mean the executive order will tie funding around the country to this or will mandate the funding -- federal funding be tied to these things?  Just connect the dots, if you can, for us about exactly how the order will work.      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  So it’s not tying; it’s incentivizing.  I mentioned, earlier, priority points.  It’s creating that ecosystem that rewards good behavior.  One of those good behaviors: If I’m applying for a federal grant, maybe you want to look at accreditation that makes you more competitive.  You got to understand that most of our discretionary money is competitive.  So if you put in the ecosystem that we’re going to prioritize funding if you have this, then they're going to do exactly what that is.      I mean, a lot of these police departments follow whatever the rules are to the T.  And so we if we put that as the priority point, it’s going to change the way that they apply for this and they’ll do that accreditation.      Q    Hi, this is Shannon Pettypiece with NBC.  One of the issues that people have raised is the issue of racism in police forces or racial stereotypes among police officers.  Is that something that the President is going to address tomorrow?  And is that a concern that he sees needs to be dealt with?      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  So, look, I think that there was some misreporting out about this earlier.  And tomorrow is about working with law enforcement and the families of those who have been killed, you know, unfortunately, and trying to bring people together with policy that will bring the country forward.      And I think that, you know, the President sees, you know, law enforcement as -- vast, vast, vast majority -- as great.  They do a great job.  They keep our communities safe.  He stands with them.  And he wants to figure out how to do things to eliminate situations where you have bad officers.      I think, you know, he was horrified and, you know, we were all horrified by the video that we saw with Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis.  And we want to make sure that we can continue to give the resources to the local communities to get closer with the -- with their police forces to do better, to build more trust.      But again, it goes back to the President’s full suite of policies that help the forgotten communities, where he's looking to -- where he’s looking to help people have opportunities to go to better schools and get better jobs and have access to capital.  And hopefully that brings more opportunity to the community, which will lead to less crime and more safety.      But, [senior administration official], you may want to address that.      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Sure.  I think [senior administration official] hit the nail on the head.  There is no one issue when it comes to the community.  There are a lot of historic factors and disparities that’s brought us here today.  Everything COVID did on shining the light on a lot of disparities such as access to capital and public health.  And then we had the protest that came about.      But the President created infrastructure to help with the disparities long before any issues happened, because he was very proactive about giving everybody a chance at the American dream.  And so it’s only allowed for us to bring more partners on the local level.  We've had a hard time having local leadership lean into actually dealing with the problems of some of these communities.  Hopefully, (inaudible) this executive order comes out, more of them will come to the table to partner with this President.      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  And what the President has been very clear on is he’s willing to work with anybody he wants to address the issues if they arise.  And, again, if you look at the suite of actions that he’s taken over the last three and a half years, he has a big record of success of really focusing on forgotten communities and trying to deliver for people, regardless of their race, religion, creed.      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Last question.      Q    Hey guys.  Thanks.  This is Christian Datoc from Daily Caller.  I'm just curious: If Congress were to pick up any of these components in future legislation, would the President sign that piece into law, even if it included provisions on qualified immunity?  Kayleigh McEnany stated last week that that’s a non-starter for the White House.  Just wondering if anything has changed on that front.      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Yeah, I would -- I think Kayleigh’s words still hold today.  And again, the President is always flexible and he’ll look at what comes to him.  But I think that would be a very -- a very high hill to climb.  I don’t see anything that has that in there passing Congress any time soon.      But, [senior administration official], do you want to just make a few final comments?      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  Yeah.  I think the meat of this executive order is focusing on those certification bodies that will work on training people through de-escalation techniques, use of force standards, including those policies that prohibit chokeholds except in those situations where deadly force is allowed by law.      And we’re leveraging our ability to execute discretionary grants and prioritizing those police departments that take the time to get that credentialing.  And so that’s the meat of this, and we think that goes a lot further than anything that anyone has put on the table right now.      SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL:  All right, that’s it, everybody.  Thanks so much for the call.  The embargo is now lifted.  Remember, this is on background and can be attributed to senior administration officials.  Thanks so much for the time.                                    END           5:56 P.M. EDT