Voices: Police reform was already withering in Washington. The Tyre Nichols’ video likely won’t change much.

The entire nation, including Washington, is bracing as the Memphis Police Department prepares to release footage of the brutal assault that led to Tyre Nichols’ death.

Mr Biden won the presidency just months after video footage showed a Minneapolis police officer placing his knee on the neck of George Floyd, which led to his death. In his victory speech, he specifically said “the African American community stood up again for me” and promised: “They always have my back, and I’ll have yours.”

Accordingly, Mr Biden has once again called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. But the bill stands little to no chance of passing this Congress after it failed last time.

During the press briefing on Friday, reporters asked Press Secretary Karine Jeane-Pierre about how he seemed all that interested in passing the bill last Congress.

“He took action as I just laid out, he took action by doing an executive taking executive action and doing everything that he could from--with the tools and so he did take it very seriously,” she said. “And he's going to continue to be very vocal.”

In many ways, by the time Mr Biden got to the White House, Washington’s appetite for creating safeguards to prevent police abuse had cooled, thanks to Republicans’ seeing a chance to paint Democrats as weak on crime and skittish.

Bipartisan talks on police reform between Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, along with former Representative Karen Bass, fell apart in September of 2021.

Even then, Republicans had found that weaponising the “Defund the Police” term, which some activists but few elected Democrats embraced, against their opponents would be politically useful. Democrats worried that it led to them losing seats in the House in 2020 even as they won the White House. Mr Biden. for his part, has taken lengths to push back against the slogan, saying the answer is to “fund the police.”

Mr Scott, who has spoken about his experiences being racially profiled as a Black man even as a member of Congress, for his part said in 2021 that talks fell apart because Democrats wanted to “defund the police.”

Republicans have since latched onto blaming Democrats for rising crime in cities, even though a study by Third Way showed states that vote Republican have a higher murder rate. Incidentally, during one of the most famous exchanges in any of the debates, Georgia Republican candidate Herschel Walker accused Senator Raphael Warnock of not supporting law enforcement, to which Mr Warnock said he did and accused Mr Walker of pretending to be a police officer. That led to the viral moment where Mr Walker flashed an officer’s badge.

Anxieties about crime contributed partially to Democrats underperforming in some blue states like New York (which incidentally led to George Santos’s election).

Now, of course, Republicans control the House of Representatives, which decreases the chances of any type of police reform passing. Meanwhile, even though Democrats increased their majority by one Senate seat, that isn’t enough to overcome a filibuster.

As a result, there likely won’t be much reform, but if there is any instance of violence in American cities, Republicans will find a way to peg it to Democratic weakness on crime.