WASHINGTON — Four White House officials will attend the funeral this week of Tyre Nichols, the Black man whose death following a traffic stop has spurred renewed calls for police reform.
White House aides Keisha Lance Bottoms, Mitch Landrieu, Tara Murray and Erica Loewe will travel to the Wednesday funeral for Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee.
At the White House on Monday, President Joe Biden again threw his support behind passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a comprehensive package of police reforms that failed to pass both chambers in the last Congress.
“I think we should do it right now. We should’ve done it before,” Biden said.
Biden said he would be willing to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus on the issue. Nichols’s parents have accepted an invitation by the caucus’s chair to attend next week’s State of the Union speech.
The president on Friday said he was “outraged and deeply pained” after watching video of the fatal beating of Nichols at the hands of Memphis police officers. Five police officers were charged last week with second-degree murder in his death.
Biden spoke with Nichols’s parents on Friday to express his condolences.
