Congress has given up on police reform. Both sides agree they missed the moment.

WASHINGTON — Less than a month after the murder of George Floyd, President Donald Trump sat in the Rose Garden and signed an executive order that required police departments to establish accreditation and accountability standards to receive federal funding.

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., attended and afterward praised the order saying it would “provide real solutions, so fewer families are sitting in the White House talking about the lost loved ones.” A little more than a year later, Scott, the chief Republican negotiator in an effort to turn police reform into law, rejected a Democratic offer that would codify that same executive order.

Democrats were mystified, and it led them to believe Scott had no interest in reaching a deal — the final straw for Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who made the decision this week to abandon negotiations.

It was the final death knell for an effort to pass sweeping bipartisan police reform that once was heralded with great hope but appeared to have missed the moment, crushed by political pressures that made it impossible for the two sides to find common ground.

“When the other side wouldn’t even codify Donald Trump’s executive order into law because it went too far, they clearly weren’t serious about creating meaningful reform,” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, told NBC News.

A spokeswoman for Scott said the Trump executive order language equated to defunding the police. “Disqualifying police departments from (federal) grants cuts off a crucial funding stream,” Caroline Anderegg, Scott’s press secretary, said in a text message.

“Defund the police” has become a politically charged phrase.

It began as the mantra of some pro-police-reform protesters in the wake of Floyd’s murder. But it quickly morphed into the rallying cry of Republicans, who argued Democrats wanted to make America less safe by stripping police departments of resources to fight crime.

Scott, in a statement after the negotiations ended Thursday, twice charged Booker and Democrats as wanting to defund the police. The various Democratic proposals provided hundreds of millions of dollars for police departments to address mental health, create misconduct databases and increase training.

But negotiations ran into political and cultural headwinds that doomed the chance of success.

“I thought they were headed toward a place where Congress would have set at least some new standards, but it could be that there’s less pressure on that issue than there was six months ago, when those talks were at their highest boiling point,” Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said.

Police accountability and transparency measures gained national momentum after the killing of Floyd. But a year later, public sentiment started to shift as summer crime spikes in cities made the politics of police reform more complicated.

The end of talks was devastating for Floyd’s family.

“We were just extremely disappointed at this point because, as you know, since March we’ve been optimistic,” Shareeduh Tate, Floyd’s cousin and president of the George Floyd Foundation, said on MSNBC. “We’ve been very patient, as everyone else has, watching this process kind of play out.”

That crime…