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Cato Daily podcast for Monday, May 17th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

Policing reform is now working its way through Congress and among the items on the table

and end to qualified immunity.

Clark Neely, Vice President for Criminal Justice at the Cato Institute, discusses the sticking

points the other policy changes worth considering, and if any Republicans might endorse ending a system of near zero accountability for police.

There is a policing bill moving its way through Congress right now. What's in it? What are the sticking points?

Well, as is so often the case, I think it really comes down to whether the law enforcement

lobby is going to succeed in offloading a bunch of meaningless window dressing

or whether we're going to actually get real reform this time.

The real reform would of course involve repealing or at least substantially pairing back qualified immunity, which is a judge-made defense that makes

it very difficult to hold police and other government officials accountable when they engage

in misconduct.

The law enforcement lobby is adamantly against any real change to qualified immunity.

And what they've essentially done is offered up some other possibilities that sound like they might have some significance but they really wouldn't.

Okay, so what's some of the window dressing here?

Yeah, so some of the window dressing would be for example limiting the kind of equipment that police departments can get for free from the

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