Many of the provisions Democrats are hailing as part of their new policing legislation were harvested from our legislative proposal formally known as The Uniform Reporting Law Enforcement Improvement Act (URLEIA). The short name assigned to URLEIA is the Equality in Policing Act. We developed URLEIA in 2015. On multiple occasions our staff, mothers of children slain by police and community advocates traveled to Congress to find a Democrat who would sponsor our sweeping legislative proposal. During the five years leading up to 2020, we could find not one Democrat who would act.

The quest to win the upcoming 2020 election, the mass protests that followed the killing of George Floyd and politically-charged calls to “defund the police” prompted Democrats to act, now.