As nightly street clashes over perceived police brutality play out in the nation’s biggest cities and politicians from the president down call for urgent action, the author of a bill to equip police officers with body cameras warned that policing reform efforts were in danger of succumbing to congressional paralysis.

Representative Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri who has introduced a number of policing reform bills, said his efforts to get the Republican House leadership to move on the issue had yet to bear fruit.

“The level of frustration is growing because it appears as if Congress is not acting,” Cleaver told the Guardian.

“There is no reason for congressional inaction. I’ve spoken to people on both sides of the aisle and people have said, ‘If it comes to the floor, I’m going to vote for it.’ The only issue now is getting it to the floor.”

Kanya Bennett, legislative counsel in the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said there had been “a lot of talk” about police reform, “but it’s not clear why there has not been a lot of action”.

“There’s a lot of deference being given to law enforcement,” Bennett said. “There is a real hesitation on the part of members of Congress to want to hold them accountable through serious and tough reform, which is what is needed here.”

Cleaver’s body camera legislation would establish a grant program to provide police departments with camera technology. Separate legislation would stop cities like Ferguson, Missouri – where the unarmed teen Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer last summer – from gathering an excessive proportion of municipal revenues from traffic tickets and fines: “taxation by citation”, Cleaver calls it.

The issue of policing reform is enjoying a rare moment of national focus. Earlier this week, Barack Obama interrupted a Rose Garden appearance with the Japanese prime minister to speak for 15 minutes on the “slow-rolling crisis” of poverty and broken justice. A day later, the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton echoed the president in the first major speech of her candidacy, saying: “We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.”

The Republican candidate Rand Paul immediately jumped in, outlining his own record of calling for criminal justice reform and attacking that of Clinton.

“I hope that we’re not just hearing politicians giving lip service to this issue,” Bennett said.

Congressman Emanuel Cleaver: ‘The frustration is growing because it appears Congress is not acting.’ Photograph: Kris Connor/Getty Images

Cleaver said he had approached Speaker John Boehner on the floor of the House for help in scheduling a hearing on the body camera bill, and that he had also approached the majority leader, Kevin McCarthy.

“I’ve been calling [McCarthy] for about two weeks,” Cleaver said. “Hopefully, when he gets some free time, he’ll call me back.”

As urgent as Obama said the need for reform was, he indicated in his Rose Garden appearance that he did not expect help from Capitol Hill.

“I’m under no illusion, that out of this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities,” Obama said. “So we’ve got to find areas where we can make a difference.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican chairman of the judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism, said last week that holding hearings on body cameras for police was “a great idea”. No such hearings have been scheduled, however, according to Senate staffers.

The public has joined politicians on both sides of the aisle in calling for action. Eighty percent of respondents in a new national poll of 18-to-29-year-olds by Harvard’s Institute of Politics favored requiring “police officers to wear body cameras while on patrol” as a possible policy change to reduce racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.

Away from Capitol Hill, assorted reform efforts show signs of activity. The Justice Department has announced a new grant program for jurisdictions to buy body cameras. A presidential taskforce on policing has produced more than 100 pages of recommendations for better data reporting by police and new community policing standards.

Other legislation includes a measure by Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York to ban chokeholds under federal civil rights law. Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, who died last July after being placed in a chokehold by police in an arrest on Staten Island, has joined the call for the ban.

Cleaver warned that there was an urgent need for national leaders to demonstrate they were doing something to fight police brutality, not least because anti-brutality protests in Baltimore and elsewhere have been led by high-school students – and the end of the school year was only weeks away.

“Now is the time for congressional action,” Cleaver said. “Because what has happened, unfortunately, is that young people have gotten the impression that no matter what happens, inaction is going to be the order of the day.

“And I think showing the people of this country that we are interested in and committed to dealing with the things that are doing damage to the nation – it would I think send out an unbelievably powerful statement across the country.

“We’ve got to be seen together, now, we can’t just have legislation. We’ve got to be seen talking about it.”