Senator Tim Scott says police reform talks collapsed because Democrats supported "defunding the police"

Senator Tim Scott is blaming Democrats' push to cut funding to law enforcement for the collapse of bipartisan police reform negotiations on Capitol Hill. Earlier this week, President Biden blamed the failure of the deal on Republicans in Congress and claimed they had "rejected enacting modest reforms, which even the previous president had supported."

"We said simply this: 'I'm not going to participate in reducing funding for the police after we saw a major city after major city defund the police.' Many provisions in this bill that he wanted me to agree to limited or reduced funding for the police, " the Republican from South Carolina said Friday during an interview with CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent and "Face the Nation" moderator Margaret Brennan. More of the interview will air on Sunday's "Face the Nation" broadcast. 

Scott, the top Republican negotiator on the issue, had been working on a deal with Senator Cory Booker and Representative Karen Bass for more than a year. The push for reform was boosted, at least initially, by the civil rights protests that swept the country last summer following the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. But in the end, the differences between the two parties proved too wide to bridge.