Glenn Ivey

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize and congratulate a dedicated professional with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) on the occasion of his retirement. Mr. Eric Raun is an exemplary public servant who has demonstrated the highest standards of professionalism serving our nation's veterans. He has served with VA's Office of General Counsel for more than 40 years. His career in public service is a testament to the importance of selfless service. For the entirety of his legal career, Mr. Raun has provided guidance to the Secretary and senior officials of the Veterans Health Administration. He has been involved in a remarkable breadth of important matters including health care eligibility reform, the establishment of the medical benefits package, the creation and development of the State Veterans Home program, gifts to VA, mental health care, and countless other issues. As Mr. Raun embarks on a new chapter in life, it is my hope that he will recall, with a deep sense of pride and accomplishment, the outstanding contributions he has made to VA, Congress, and veterans of the United States. May his life be filled with health and happiness.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, it is with great honor I rise today to coanchor this CBC Special Order hour with Chairman Horsford, the chairman of the CBC, and Ms. Kamlager-Dove of California. For the next 60 minutes, we have a chance to speak directly to the American people on issues of great importance to the Congressional Black Caucus, Congress, the constituents we represent, and all Americans. Today, we will be speaking on the death of Tyre Nichols. Mr. Speaker, I rise today--after the horrifying murder of yet another young, Black man at the hands of police--outraged because nothing has worked. ``They need more police training,'' we said. But so-called elite squads like SCORPION already require extra training over and above the basics. ``They need more diversity,'' we said. But every single one of the five officers we saw mercilessly beat an unarmed and compliant Tyre Nichols was Black, just like him. ``They need more accountability,'' we said. But even the advent of body cameras hasn't stopped officers from pummeling our sons--and sometimes our daughters--to death over mere traffic infractions. Just throw in a few shouts of: ``Stop resisting'' to try and fool our eyes from believing what we are clearly seeing. We tried all those things--more training, more diversity, and more accountability--and yet Tyre Nichols is dead. He was dragged out of his car and attacked by a swarm of men twice his size, exhausting themselves and then coming back to beat him again. Reforming these so-called elite squads is not enough. It is time to end them altogether. These units often attract and recruit young, aggressive officers drawn to the prospect of less supervision. They slap an intimidating name on the team, like SCORPION or STRESS or CRASH--which in the nineties stood for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums--because these units aren't about forging bonds with the communities they serve. They are about instilling fear. They descend on low-income, usually minority neighborhoods looking to make pretextual stops in search of drugs or guns. That is not a secret. It is a tactic sanctioned by the Supreme Court itself. An officer can stop anyone for whatever reason he wants. He doesn't even need to know which law he suspects you of breaking, Mr. Speaker, so long as he can develop a reason after the fact--reasons that are often minor, trivial, and unrelated. Things like a busted taillight or partially obscured traffic tag are sufficient for these stops. This is formal policy in police departments across the country. For example, the New York City Police Department admittedly trained its officers to ``stop and question first, develop reasonable suspicion later.'' What results is a constant state of alert. Black and Brown males worry about being pulled over for a minor traffic stop that can spiral out of control. Police officers worry because they are understandably taught that there is nothing more dangerous than to walk up to a stranger's driver-side window at night. Both sides of the confrontation are on edge. And for what? So that an officer can peek inside the car for contraband and ask for so-called consent to search the car, despite many drivers feeling like they can't say no. These pretextual traffic stops aren't bearing much fruit. A study found that stop-and-frisk searches in New York City produced drugs or guns in less than 2 percent of the cases. What it does is breed contempt between the police and the people they are sworn to protect. African Americans are five times more likely to have their vehicles searched, and a Black man has to hit the age of 50 before his chance of being pulled over lowers to that of a young White man. As the father of five Black sons, I am all too familiar with the talk parents are duty bound to give their Black and Brown children about how to deescalate interactions with the police. As a former prosecutor, I saw firsthand how communities can be ravaged by fear in the face of violent crime and threats to public safety. Those communities should not also be afraid of the men and women in uniform whose job it is to defend them. Police can't investigate crime if victims and witnesses don't trust them enough to come forward. These squads running roughshod on our streets are contributing to a breakdown in that trust. It isn't leading to better results, but it is contributing to the unjustified killing of our kids. Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis did the right thing by shutting down the SCORPION unit. But we must not wait until the next murder of an innocent man gets national attention before we shut down these roving elite squads across the country. Professor Christy E. Lopez, the co-chair of the D.C. Police Reform Commission, made the case brilliantly in a recent Washington Post editorial titled: ``Cities should get rid of their toxic crime- suppression units.'' Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record this article by Christy E. Lopez. [From the Washington Post, Jan. 31, 2023] Cities Should get rid of Their Toxic Crime-Suppression Units (By Christy E. Lopez) Last week, after five Memphis police officers were charged with murdering their son, Tyre Nichols's family called for the dissolution of Scorpion, the specialized policing unit to which those officers were assigned. On Saturday, Memphis made the right decision and announced it would shut the unit down. Now, other cities should follow Memphis's lead and disband their own analogous--and outdated--units. In my decades investigating law enforcement agencies, and studying what makes them prone to causing unnecessary harm, I have consistently found that units such as Scorpion are a key factor. And they are not unusual. Most mid-size to large cities have a unit--or several--akin to Scorpion, focused on areas considered to be crime ``hot spots'' or on a particular task such as seizing drugs or guns. These teams have various names orbiting around buzzwords like ``crime suppression'' or ``violence reduction.'' In the communities they police, they're often just called ``jump outs.'' Regardless of the name, they are all under official direction--pressure, even--to aggressively police areas deemed high-crime, nearly always majority Black or Latino, often using traffic and pedestrian stops as an excuse to search people and their belongings in the hopes of finding guns or other contraband. It's possible that Scorpion was a particularly bad specimen of this family of aggressive policing units: As one police chief noted, the name ``speaks volumes about the mission of the unit and the mentality of the officers.'' That ``Scorpion'' was an acronym for ``Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods'' is a mockery of genuine concern for community well-being. But this tolerance for inflicting community pain in the name of community protection is a thread that runs through these teams going back decades. In the 1990s, the Los Angeles Police Department's ``special investigations section'' was an ``elite'' unit known both for the extraordinary number of people it killed in shootouts and for its practice of allowing community members to be victimized so it could make better arrests. During a Justice Department investigation of the New Orleans Police Department in 2010, a police official told investigators that the community viewed street crime ``task forces'' as ``jump out boys, dirty cops, the ones who are going to be brutal.'' These task forces finally were ended in 2020 after the federal monitor showed they operated with little supervision, made stops with ``questionable legal basis,'' didn't document their work and endangered citizens. An investigation of the Baltimore Police Department's notoriously corrupt and violent Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) found that although created in 2007, its abusive tactics had roots dating back to at least 1999. Yet the GTTF was not disbanded until eight of its officers were indicted in 2017. In Washington, the D.C. Police Reform Commission (which I co-chaired) recommended in 2021 that the Metropolitan Police Department suspend its crime-suppression teams and gun recovery unit until it could provide data showing its effectiveness. The department has not done so, although late last year, it suspended one crime-suppression team after seven of its officers were put under investigation. A month ago, a former officer from another team was convicted of second-degree murder for a 2020 car chase that killed Karon Hylton-Brown (another unit officer was found guilty of obstructing justice). These units can't be fixed. Their problems go beyond issues with selection, training or supervision. The premise on which they are based ensures they will fail communities. Everything we know teaches us that, to be effective, policing must center community well-being and fair treatment. But these units are focused on stats: arrests made, guns and drugs recovered, even overtime hours worked. This incentivizes policing that takes full advantage (and then some) of the broad discretion under law--including pretext stops and discretion to jail that is broader than a judge's--to detain and search people based on little more than a hunch, a profile or where they live. It's an approach that has been shown time and again to be inefficient, alienating and confrontation-provoking, even as its impact on crime is uncertain. I have talked with many police officers who are ambivalent about--or even resentful of--these units, which generally do not respond to calls for service. This leaves regular patrol officers to pick up the slack--and often, the pieces of community relationship broken by interactions with the specialized units. These patrol officers live the mixed messages given by police and city leadership: They are sternly admonished to build trust and take action only where public safety requires, even as they see leadership encouraging (and promoting) members of crime-suppression teams. They watch as the relationships they built with community members go unnoticed and the latest gun and drug bust earns a commendation. Heavily policed communities will tell you exactly how this contradiction plays out: ``The police are everywhere,'' I often have been told, ``until you need them.'' Suppression units also become petri dishes for cultures of impunity. As long as they ``produce,'' making arrests and bringing in contraband, chiefs can ward off unrealistic expectations that policing solve social problems. But facilitating this kind of ``production'' has always, in my experience, gone hand-in-hand with indulging lax adherence to law and policy, discounting or glossing over misconduct complaints and generous overtime approval. These units reflect and reinforce the worst aspects of warrior policing. The cost-benefit analysis makes no sense once you recognize that we have underestimated their harms, and the benefits they offer could be better achieved through services that respond more directly to community needs and work to reduce the root causes of crime. Disbanding Scorpion was likely a little too little, and certainly a little too late. Other communities should not wait for an act of searing violence before rethinking this approach. It's time to recognize the harm these units cause-- and put an end to them and the approach to policing they embody.

Mr. IVEY. Finally, I think the time has come to end pretextual stops completely because they are just racial profiling hiding behind legalese and little more than a subtle way to circumvent the constitutional rights of Black and Brown males. Pretext stops allow police to stop cars even though they lack even reasonable suspicion to think that an actual crime is, has been, or is about to be committed. They allow police to pressure drivers into a so-called consensual search so that they can avoid the need to obtain a warrant to search the car. As we have seen yet again, these pretextual stops frequently escalate into young men being killed or seriously injured not because they broke the law but because they have been targeted for aggressive police tactics that aren't directed at other communities. So, Mr. Speaker, I urge President Biden to use his executive authority to put an end to this practice at the Federal level, and I urge State and local officials--mayors, police chiefs, and county executives--to put an end to this practice all over the country. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Kamlager-Dove).

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include any extraneous material on the subject of this Special Order.

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentlewoman for her powerful and extemporaneous comments. I think it is a representation of the powerful leadership she has provided over the years and will continue to provide in the future. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Nevada (Mr. Horsford), my colleague, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for that powerful statement. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson), my colleague, the Representative from the Fourth District of Georgia.

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining.

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne).

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for those powerful comments. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining?

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Adams).

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining?

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Bowman).

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Cherfilus-McCormick).

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Mrs. Sykes).

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, on behalf of Representative Kamlager-Dove and the Congressional Black Caucus, we thank the Speaker for this opportunity. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.