[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 11190-11194]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                POLICE AND CIVILIAN RELATIONS IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to take this time from the 
minority leader on behalf of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. We 
are doing a Special Order hour this evening on police and civilian 
relations.
  We are joined by the very distinguished Congressman Keith Ellison. 
Before we start, though, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Sherman).


                  Honoring the Life of Nadadur Vardhan

  Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the life of my good 
friend of 30 years, Nadadur Vardhan, a leader in the Indian-American 
community, who passed away on July 3 of this

[[Page 11191]]

year at age 70 in Los Angeles, surrounded by his extended family.
  Nadadur Vardhan was born in India and immigrated to the United States 
in 1978. Arriving in America with just the clothes on his back, he 
poured his energy into building a career as an international tax 
consultant. Over four decades, he grew his Santa Monica-based 
accounting practice to a thriving firm.
  Nadadur served as President of the Malibu Hindu Temple, one of the 
largest Hindu temples in the United States, and invited me to speak 
there and to be there on many occasions. As president of the temple, he 
was regularly invited to speak to political, cultural, and religious 
groups across the world. Nadadur also founded the Indo-American Vision 
Foundation, a pioneering independent think tank that empowered Indian-
American political activism.
  For his work in promoting the Indo-American community, he received 
the Ellis Island Medal of Honor. A passionate community leader, he 
personally met with many U.S. Presidents, Prime Ministers of India, and 
other elected officials. Nadadur was responsible for organizing several 
major cultural and political events, many of which I was honored to 
attend, including the World Hindu Economic Forum, forums with Indian 
Ambassadors to the United States, and events with a wide range of 
public figures.
  Mr. Speaker, I ask that all of my colleagues join me in honoring his 
many contributions to our Nation and to extend condolences to his wife, 
Dr. Indubala Nadadur Vardhan; his daughters, Dr. Malini Nadadur and 
Anjani Nadadur; his brother, Nadadur Kumar; his sisters, Dr. Pushpa 
Kasturi and Alamelu Krishnamachary; his extended family; and to all 
whose lives he touched.
  Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Sherman for his comments. And 
again, the Progressive Caucus Special-Order hour tonight is on the 
subject of the police power in America, and its uses, its abuses, what 
has been taking place in different parts of the country, and we are 
going to kick off with Keith Ellison, who has been the chair of the 
Progressive Caucus. And in addition to being a distinguished member of 
the Congress from Minnesota, he is the vice chairman of the Democratic 
National Committee.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison).
  Mr. ELLISON. Mr. Speaker, I do appreciate the gentleman for yielding.
  Mr. Speaker, I come before the House today to talk about a tragic 
situation involving Justine Damond. Justine Damond was a young woman 
who saw what she believed to be a sexual assault outside of her home. 
She then made a call to the police and asked them to come to give 
assistance.
  Ms. Damond then went outside to try to meet with the police to report 
what she saw, and for some reason, which no one really knows quite yet, 
she was shot in the abdomen and died.
  Ms. Damond, 40 years old, she was due to be married in only a few 
weeks. She leaves behind a fiance, her fiance's son, her family, her 
parents, and here we are again dealing with a tragic situation in which 
an unarmed civilian has been shot by a member of law enforcement.
  Now, as I speak today, Mr. Speaker, I want to be very clear. I know 
many police officers personally. I know how hard they work. I know the 
dangers that they incur. I know that they, by and large, join the force 
because they want to help people, because they are courageous and brave 
and are willing to put themselves in harm's way in order to protect 
other citizens. And I myself, and many people I know, have called on 
the police to stop crimes from happening, to report them, and we are 
grateful when they report.
  But it is also true, Mr. Speaker, that officer-involved shootings 
happen with tremendous frequency, and it is not even a matter of 
blaming the officer. We have to ask ourselves what is going on with the 
system of policing which allows us to return to this tragic scenario 
again and again and again.
  Justine Damond, again, was reportedly in her pajamas, and she was 
trying to help another person, yet somehow the officer, who was on the 
passenger side of the squad car, shot through the door or the window, 
and that is not clear, and she sustained lethal injuries.
  One of the most disturbing things about this particular case, Mr. 
Speaker, is that the officer's body cameras were not turned on. The 
dash cam did not capture the interaction between Justine and the 
officers, and the body cams were, again, as I mentioned, not on. This 
is despite the fact that all Minneapolis police officers have worn body 
cameras since the end of 2016. Why the body cameras were not on, we can 
only speculate.
  But I urge, with everything I have, that the Minnesota Bureau of 
Criminal Apprehension, Minneapolis Police Department, and everyone and 
anyone who has jurisdictional authority investigate the reason for 
these tools to not be in use.
  Justine is dead. Justine is not coming back. And it is true that 
innocent people get killed by criminals all day, and that is a sad 
reality of our world. It doesn't just happen in my city of Minneapolis. 
It happens all over the country. It happens all over the globe.
  But I think that citizens expect that members of law enforcement, who 
are sworn to protect us, would take due care to protect life, not end 
it, unless there was a legal basis to do so.
  Now, again, I don't know what happened here. Nobody really knows what 
caused the officer to somehow reach over his partner and shoot Ms. 
Damond in the abdomen and kill her when she is unarmed and wearing 
pajamas and is the reporter of a crime. The weeks and days ahead will 
reveal what happened. But I assure you that this will not be the last 
time that it happens unless, as a society, we begin to ask ourselves 
why these things are happening.
  In our community in Minnesota, we are still trying to figure out how 
to deal with it, how to cope with the death of Philando Castile. 
Philando Castile was shot and killed on videotape, captured on live-
stream Facebook. To the credit of John Choi, who was the prosecutor, 
district attorney in Ramsey County, Minnesota, that officer was charged 
with the criminal offense of manslaughter, and after a jury trial, that 
officer was acquitted.
  When I looked at the dash cam and saw the officer discharge his 
firearm into the body of Philando Castile, it was absolutely 
horrifying, and I couldn't possibly understand why this happened. I 
don't know what the jurors saw, and I am a lawyer myself, and I support 
the jury system, but I can tell you that Philando Castile, who did have 
a firearm, said: Officer, I have a firearm; I have a license to carry a 
firearm. And the next thing you know, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, young 
man dead.
  Philando Castile was a beloved member of his community. He was the 
lunch attendant. He was the lunch manager at Hill Elementary School in 
St. Paul, and the children needed counseling, and the families needed 
somebody to explain why was Philando Castile shot this way.
  The children are raised to respect the police, but they knew Philando 
Castile and they loved him, and they couldn't reconcile why the police, 
who they respect, would hurt Philando Castile, who they also respected 
and admired and loved.
  Jamar Clark, another one from Minnesota, unarmed, shot, killed, 
tremendous outpouring of community frustration around this, brought an 
18-day protest outside of the Fourth Precinct in Minneapolis, and you 
know, drew the attention of the entire community. And I can assure you 
that many people, particularly young people, were angry, upset, 
frustrated, feeling very vulnerable because they just felt that there 
was no accountability in that their lives just didn't matter very much 
in the eyes of the people who were sworn to protect and defend them.
  We have a community problem, Mr. Speaker. We have to come together 
and deal with it, and it is simply not enough to say it is all the 
cops' fault or it is all the citizens' fault. This is a social problem 
that calls for a social solution.
  Part of it will be changes in law. Part of it will be departmental 
changes. Part of it will be changes in the way we

[[Page 11192]]

do business. But we have got to have these changes. And if people just 
say, ``It is not my fault, you know, it was an accident, this person 
had it coming,'' we will never get to the bottom of these kind of 
things.
  Mr. Speaker, in 1967, there were a state of civil disturbances, some 
people call riots, throughout our urban areas, and the government 
responded by issuing something called a Kerner Commission Report, K-E-
R-N-E-R. And one of the findings of that is that police community 
relations were incredibly bad, that communication was poor, and that 
the police were essentially sent into areas that were economically and 
socially isolated and deprived in order to keep order, and what really 
should have been happening is that we should have been investing in 
jobs and opportunity and social inclusion, and we just asked the police 
to sort of just solve this problem without making the investments that 
our society should have made.

                              {time}  1830

  I am sad to say that we really don't seem to have advanced very far. 
The fact is that often civil disturbances, which are often referred to 
as riots, occur after these tragic shootings. Civil judgments are paid 
out. Citizens tend to distrust the police and are less willing to call 
them when they need them.
  There are tremendous social costs to not addressing these officer-
involved shootings involving unarmed civilians, and we have to be there 
to do something about it.
  We have seen a number of tragic circumstances all across the country, 
whether it is Sandra Bland or whether it is Walter Scott in South 
Carolina, whether it is Eric Garner who died begging for a breath or 
whether it is all of the victims of Officer Holtzclaw who routinely and 
systematically sexually abused women in Oklahoma City. The fact is 
there is great discretionary latitude conferred on our law enforcement 
officers.
  We need more oversight and accountability. We need people to be held 
accountable when they break the law, and I mean people who are police 
and people who are not. We need to say that there is one standard of 
justice and that everyone has to adhere to it.
  We know about Michael Brown, 17 years old, shot in 2014, or we could 
say Tamir Rice. There are so many cases. They just go on and on and on. 
We are at a point where we have to address this crisis.
  Now, Ms. Damond is one of more than 500 fatal shootings by police 
this year alone. I will say it again, Mr. Speaker. Ms. Damond is one of 
more than 500 people who have been fatally killed by the police this 
year. Some of them, the officer may have had legal justification, some 
not; but when you have got 500 people across this country being shot 
and killed, it is a crisis that we have to do something about.
  This year, I could simply tell you, Mr. Speaker, that offering 
prayers simply isn't going to get it done. We have a systemic problem, 
and whether we have to talk about addressing body cameras more and 
insisting upon their use or whether we need implicit bias training for 
police to raise awareness of unconscious or implicit biases, whether we 
need to train officers on the deescalation of force and have training 
in that regard and, yes, prosecutions of people who just commit crimes 
with a uniform on, we have got to take decisive action.
  We need more diversity in police departments, and we need more 
diversity in jury selection. We need grand jury reform, and we need the 
Department of Justice to keep account of all the cases that involve 
officer-involved shootings.
  One thing we absolutely do not need is for the Attorney General, 
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, to abandon consent decrees, which have 
brought some level of understanding and communication between 
communities and the police departments. We need a partner in the 
Federal Government, Mr. Speaker. What is at stake is too important.
  We also need quality schools. We need investment in neighborhoods. We 
need quality jobs and affordable housing. We need healthcare for all, 
and we need to have clean air and water for everyone. We need those 
things as part of the ecosystem that human beings live in. But none of 
these things are a replacement for decent, respectful treatment people 
deserve from law enforcement.
  I am not here to give up. I am here to engage police in a dialogue 
about how we reduce these shootings, how we increase the trust, how we 
make sure that no one feels that they can't go to the police because 
the trust has been so severely damaged.
  I believe we have got to come together as a society and recognize 
that this problem is serious. It is not getting better; in fact, it is 
getting worse.
  When you think about cases involving people like Mya Hall, or Alexa 
Christian, Meagan Hockaday, Sandra Bland, Natasha McKenna, all African-
American women killed by or after encounters with the police, it is not 
just men; it is women, too. It is not just African Americans; it is 
whites, too. Justine Damond was a white female. It is Latinos. It is 
people of different economic stations. It is not just one community. If 
Ms. Damond's case proves anything, it is that officer-involved 
shootings of unarmed civilians don't only occur in certain 
neighborhoods of certain people.
  The time is now for us to act. And I do put out a call for police and 
communities to engage in an intensive discussion about how we restore 
trust, how we increase accountability, and how we really make it true 
when we write on the side doors of our police vehicles all across this 
country, ``to protect and serve.''
  Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Ellison very much for those very 
thoughtful and insightful comments.
  I want to pick up the discussion about the police power and expand 
the discussion to include not just power over persons, but power over 
property in America.
  Our Constitution's Framers were deeply informed by the social 
contract theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries, and those theorists 
believed that we enter into a social contract out of a state of nature, 
because we are all made better off by virtue of being part of a 
society.
  So the first incarnation of it came from Thomas Hobbes in his work on 
the ``Leviathan.'' Hobbes argued that the state of nature was, in his 
famous words, ``nasty, brutish, and short,'' because anybody could kill 
anybody. And so we enter into society together, and we give our power 
to the leviathan, the government.
  Now, the problem with his view, of course, was that the leviathan, 
the government, had whatever powers it wanted, unlimited, infinite 
powers. And at that point, as the Framers of our Constitution would 
see, you have got a real problem, because you might be saved from 
criminals and bandits and thieves, but now you have got to deal with an 
all-powerful government and police who can trample your rights just as 
much as the thieves and the bandits could. So the Hobbesian theory was 
inadequate.
  John Locke, in his famous work on the social contract, improved upon 
the proposition. The state of nature for him was not quite so frightful 
a place. There were certain virtues to a state of nature, so people 
were actually giving something up by going into it.
  So in his view, entering the social contract meant that we would 
surrender some of our powers to government, and certainly our powers to 
commit violence and theft against other people, but in return, we would 
be guaranteed rights by the government and we would also have rights 
against the government, and that was the view that deeply informed the 
U.S. Constitution.
  The whole point of the rule of law is that the people have rights 
against the government, against those who are just the agents of the 
sovereign. The sovereign is the people. The people are the sleeping 
sovereign who can come awake in times of constitution-making and also 
in order to make law.
  Now, the whole social contract becomes unraveled Hobbesian style if 
we are attacked by the police. So my friend, Congressman Poe from 
Texas, earlier spoke about the horrific spectacle of violence waged 
against U.S.

[[Page 11193]]

citizens and others in the streets of Washington, D.C., by the thugs of 
Prime Minister Erdogan from Turkey, who were unleashed on protesters, 
and we saw, as Congressman Poe said, a scene of really savage violence 
take place right here in Washington.
  I am glad that we have a bipartisan consensus that that kind of 
police attack on freedom of expression, freedom of assembly is 
unacceptable in the United States of America, whether it is on citizens 
or whether it is on permanent residents or whether it is on 
noncitizens.
  But there is something else that is going on in the country having to 
do with the police power. The police power in common law terms, in the 
American vernacular, is not just the power that police officers have to 
regulate public safety and public order; the police power also has to 
do generally with the governmental power to regulate.
  There are some very troubling things that are taking place in America 
today. One of them has to do with the eminent domain power. We are 
seeing rampant abuse of the eminent domain power across the country 
today, where private developers use their political power and influence 
in campaign contributions in order to get local governments or State 
governments to condemn private property of homeowners in order to oust 
them from their homes in order to build a private project.
  Now, one of the chief perpetrators of this business model in the 
United States of America happens to be the President of the United 
States, Donald Trump, who has bragged about his use of the eminent 
domain power and has been involved in a lot of litigation relating to 
eminent domain power.
  I will take you to Atlantic City and introduce you to a woman named 
Vera Coking, who lived in a three-story house off of the Boardwalk in 
Atlantic City right next door to the 22-story Trump Plaza that then-
businessman Donald Trump had built. Trump had built the hotel; he built 
the casino; he built a parking garage. But it wasn't enough for him. He 
wanted a VIP parking garage.
  He wanted a parking garage for limos and made an offer, which Ms. 
Coking refused, on her house so he could demolish her house and build 
his expanded garage. She said: No, thank you.
  He came back with another offer. She said: No, thank you. It is not a 
question of money. My family has lived in this house for generations, 
and my kids went to school here, and we belong to the church here. It 
is not for sale.
  Well, then at that point, President Trump, in order to build his 
gold-plated parking garage for the limos, went to a government agency 
that he knew well called the Atlantic City Casino Redevelopment 
Authority to help him take away Ms. Coking's property, and they entered 
into litigation. Fortunately, she found pro bono counsel in the 
Libertarian public interest group, the Institute for Justice, a 
Libertarian think tank and legal action center, and they were able to 
stop Donald Trump in court in a case called Atlantic City Community 
Redevelopment Authority v. Banin. Unfortunately, that took place before 
the famous Kelo v. New London decision in 2005.
  Now, there was a very similar scenario in Kelo, in a hard-hit 
working-class town in Connecticut called New London, where the Pfizer 
Corporation and a local private land redevelopment authority, one of 
these shadowy, mixed public-private entities, decided that they wanted 
to displace a whole neighborhood in New London so they could destroy 
the blight, as they called it, and put in their brand-new development.
  Ms. Kelo, a very soft-spoken single woman, working-class woman, 
decided to fight, and she also found the Institute for Justice, and 
they organized the community to say, no, they were not blight, that 
they had ties to this community and they were not going to be forced 
out by these big corporations.
  They won all the way up to the Supreme Court, and then a five-Justice 
majority in the Supreme Court, in the Kelo decision in 2005, determined 
that it is perfectly constitutional and consistent with the Takings 
Clause in the Fifth Amendment of our Constitution for a public 
municipal corporation to condemn a person's private home or a private 
small business in order to turn it over to another private business if 
it is consistent with someone's economic redevelopment plan. And this 
was a decision that President Trump said he ``agrees with 100 
percent.''
  Because, remember, that was his business model, that everything is 
for sale, and if you refuse to sell to Donald Trump and his companies, 
they are just going to get public authority to come in to get you out 
of the way so they can condemn your land and take it over.
  Now, it turns out that in the Kelo decision, after the Supreme 
Court's erroneous judgment in it, the land was condemned, Susette Kelo 
was forced out of her house, and--guess what--they never even built it. 
Today it is an urban wilderness taken over by wild cats.

                              {time}  1845

  Well, let's look at another example of abuse of police power in 
America today.
  I understand that earlier this morning, the Justice Department 
announced a new Federal policy to help State and local police officers 
take cash and property from anybody suspected of a crime even without 
arresting them, even without charging them with a crime, and even 
without an arrest warrant, reversing an Obama administration rule that 
was put in place because of rampant abuse of people's rights across the 
country.
  This is the United States of America. The police should not be able 
to stop people on the street, in their cars, or at their homes and say: 
I think that the money you have doesn't really belong to you. I think 
the condo you have doesn't belong to you. I think the car you have 
doesn't belong to you. I think your property looks suspect. We are 
going to seize it. And then we are going to hold it, and you have the 
burden of coming to sue us to prove that your property is innocent--
without charging them with a crime, without arresting them, or without 
using a search warrant. This is what Attorney General Sessions wants to 
do with the Orwellian new order that he handed down today. He wants to 
get the Federal Government back into the business of working with State 
and local governments to simply declare people's property and their 
money presumptively guilty. And then they have to go out, hire a 
lawyer, and go to court to prove that their property or money is clean 
within the eyes of the government.
  But whatever happened to due process? Under our Constitution, we are 
presumed to be innocent of crimes, and our property should be presumed 
to be innocent of crimes if there is no legal process at all to condemn 
our property or to cast a shadow of criminal suspicion over it.
  If you look at the history of this, Attorney General Holder barred 
State and local police from using the Federal legal regime to seize 
cash and other property without criminal charges or without criminal 
warrants, which is the right way to do it. That is the constitutional 
way to think about it.
  In a democratic society, the people are presumed to be innocent until 
they are proven guilty. It is not as if we are walking around with the 
stigma of being presumed guilty of doing something in the eyes of the 
State.
  Since 2008, thousands of police agencies have made more than 55,000 
seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a Justice 
Department civil asset forfeiture program, which allowed the police to 
make seizures and then share the proceeds with Federal agencies. It 
allowed the Federal agencies to cooperate with State and local law 
enforcement.
  Then the Department of Justice said they were disengaging from that 
because there was a series in The Washington Post about all of the 
extraordinary abuses taking place.
  There was one gentleman, a small business man, a Chinese-American 
citizen of the United States who was traveling with a lot of money 
because he was going to purchase a building for his new Chinese 
restaurant that he was going to open up, and so he had, I think

[[Page 11194]]

it was around $25,000 or $30,000 with him. He got stopped by the police 
and he was exceedingly nervous about the whole thing. They said he was 
acting nervous and they took his money from him, his life savings that 
he was hanging on to in order to go and purchase a building for a 
Chinese restaurant. Luckily, he found some lawyers, but it took several 
years for him to get the money back. He lost the deal.
  He is in the minority because most people this happens to never go to 
court to try to get their money back, they are so terrified and 
demoralized by the experience of having their property taken by 
government agents without any due process at all.
  I urge everyone to go and find that Washington Post series on the 
abuses that led up to the change in policy that was put into place by 
Attorney General Eric Holder.
  Now, Attorney General Sessions does a U-turn. The administration, 
which President Trump started by saying he wanted to give power back to 
the States and back to the people of the United States, instead says 
the Federal Government is going to be incentivizing more violation of 
people's due process rights by allowing seizure of people's property 
and money.
  It goes back to what Congressman Ellison was talking about: What is 
this going to do for police-civilian relations in the United States, 
when people are terrified that their property can be taken away by 
agents of the State without an arrest, without a criminal warrant, or 
without any charges at all? That is not right in our country. That is 
not right in a country that does not allow for a taking of private 
property without a public purpose. It is not right in a country that is 
based on due process of law, that is based on probable cause and search 
warrants for people being searched.
  That is where this administration is taking us with the policy that 
was announced earlier today. It is going to make our communities only 
more suspicious and only more dangerous.
  We have to step back from this Orwellian leviathan vision of 
government, an all-powerful State that can seize your home or your 
small business because a big business man like Donald Trump wants your 
property to build his casino garage for his VIP guests; or because some 
fancy company decides it wants to redevelop your land; or because the 
police decide you don't look the right way and we are just going to 
take your money out of your pocket, we are going to seize what is in 
your wallet, we are going to take your car, we are going to take your 
boat, or we are going to take your condo or apartment without any 
criminal charges at all, and you go and deal with the problem.
  Mr. Speaker, in the United States of America, we are a land of laws. 
The great Tom Paine said that, in the monarchies, the king is law, but 
in the democracies, the law is king.
  We have to abide by the rule of law here. And I am not talking about 
Democrat, Republican, left, or right. We all have to be constitutional 
patriots in America, to stand up for our Constitution.
  I would invite the President of the United States to come join us 
here to talk about the problem of eminent domain abuse and to talk 
about the problem of law enforcement taking people's property and their 
money without due process of law, because it is a serious threat to 
everything that we believe in and why we created our social contract. 
All of us have got to be constitutional patriots and stand up for the 
basic principles of the country.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________