#Trump wants police reform bill ‘sooner rather than later’: White House

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said President Trump wants police reform legislation “sooner than later” as he and other administration officials trekked to Capitol Hill for discussions with Republican senators, according to a report.

‘It’s a work in progress, so it was a real good conversation,” Meadows said following Tuesday’s meeting, Politico reported.

“We want to let our actions speak louder than words,” he said. “We’re hopeful for something sooner rather than later.”

Top White House adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Ja’Ron Smith, an assistant to the president, accompanied Meadows to the meeting with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), who has been charged with leading the GOP effort on creating a package of legislative proposals.

“We’re hopeful that we can address the issue in a real way,” Meadows said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who named Scott, the sole black GOP senator, to head up the group, said he thinks “it’s important to have a response” to the nationwide protests that have been continuing since George Floyd’s death while in custody of the Minneapolis police department on May 25.

“You know, none of us have had the experience of being an African American in this country and dealing with this discrimination, which persists here some 50 years after the 1964 civil rights bill and the 1965 civil rights bill — we’re still wrestling with America’s original sin,” the Kentucky Republican said.

Protesters and members of the Black Lives Matter movement have rallied around the call to “defund the police” since Floyd’s death.

And some cities – Los Angeles and New York – have taken steps to divert funds away from their police departments to youth programs and social services.

Minneapolis has moved to abolish its police department.

But Trump has vowed that there will be no dismantling or defunding during his time in office.

“We won’t be defunding our police. We won’t be dismantling our police, and there’s not going to be any disbanding of our police. Our police have been letting us live in peace,” Trump told a roundtable of law enforcement officials at the White House on Monday.

The president said the majority of cops are dedicated to serving the public.

“We want to make sure we don’t have any bad actors in there and sometimes you’ll see some horrible things, like we witnessed recently,” Trump said. “But 99, I say 99.9, but let’s go with 99 percent of them are great great people and they’ve done jobs that are record setting — record setting — so our crime statistics are at a level that they haven’t been at.”

Congressional Democrats have kept their distance from the “defund the police” movement while putting together a package of police reform proposals that would include banning chokeholds, creating a national database to track “problematic” officers and limit qualified immunity for police that shields them from legal or civil actions.

With Post wires