President Donald Trump says he’d like to see an end to the police use of chokeholds, except in certain circumstances.
“I don’t like chokeholds,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News Channel that aired Friday. “Generally speaking,” he said, the practice should be ended. But Trump also talked at length about a scenario in which a police officer is alone and fighting one-on-one and could have to resort to the tactic.
Chokeholds have come under renewed scrutiny in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in police custody, which has sparked mass protests across the nation and around the world demanding justice, racial equality and policing reform. Though the tactic was not used on Floyd, who died after a police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck and after Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe, it has become a symbol of police brutality and there have been calls nationwide to ban its use.
The maneuver is banned in many departments across the country already. A chokehold is a tactic in which an officer puts his or her arm around the neck of a suspect, blocking airflow. Eric Garner died in 2014 after a police chokehold, though the officer responsible maintains he used a different, legal take down maneuver called the seat belt, in which an officer puts one arm around a suspects chest and another around the waist to wrestle a suspect to the ground.
In response to the protests, the White House has been working to craft an executive order on policing, though it is unclear if the final version will address chokeholds at all. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Trump did not mention the tactic during a round-table discussion in Texas Thursday in which he discussed the order.
Lawmakers on the Hill have also been working to craft legislation in response. And even as he endorsed scaling back their use, Trump nonetheless sounded convinced that chokeholds were sometimes necessary, calling it a very tricky situation in his interview with Fox.
“Sometimes if you’re alone, and you’re fighting someone whose tough, and you get somebody in a chokehold… What are you gonna do now? Let go and say: Oh lets start all over again? I’m not allowed to have you in a chokehold,” he said. “I think the concept of chokeholds sounds so innocent, so perfect. And then you, realise if its a one-on-one… if a police officer is in a bad scuffle and hes got somebody… So you have to be very careful.” With that being said, it would be, “I think, a very good thing that, generally speaking, it should be ended,” he added.