Organizers of the BREATHE Act capitalized on the momentum from the summer 2020 protests and a discernible shift in public opinion to push for policy change at the level of the federal government.
"[6] After a number of highly publicized killings of Black Americans at the hands of police officers, most notably the murder of George Floyd and the shooting of Breonna Taylor, a series of protests began to spread around the country.
Later in August, during the Democratic National Convention, famous actors including Jane Fonda and Kendrick Sampson, released a video reading the rejected amendments and called for them to be added to the DNC platform.
The legislation is divided into 4 sections, which call for the following:[10] The bill, in part, would "divest" federal resources from incarceration and policing, institute changes to pretrial detention, sentencing and prosecution, and also reduce the Department of Defense budget.
[12][13] For example, the BREATHE Act would repeal the "three-strikes law", which, when it passed in 1994, was seen as a rule that would deter repeat criminal activity, and prohibit use of the modern taser, which was developed in the 1990s by a private company and subsequently marketed as a way to prevent police killings as an alternative to firearms.