Police and white people blamed by Hillary Clinton for recent shootings
Hillary Clinton spoke to CNN on Friday calling for white people and police officers to change and help reduce the number of African-Americans killed in tense exchanges with cops.
photo/ donkeyhotey
“I will call for white people, like myself, to put ourselves in the shoes of those African-American families who fear every time their children go somewhere, who have to have ‘The Talk,’ about, you now, how to really protect themselves [from police], when they’re the ones who should be expecting protection from encounters with police,” Clinton told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
“I’m going to be talking to white people, we’re the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries coming from our African-American fellow citizens,” she said.
“We’ve got to figure out what is happening when routine traffic stops, when routine arrests, escalate into killings … Clearly, there seems to be a terrible disconnect between many police departments and officers and the people they have sworn to protect,” she said.
Federal policing guidelines are needed because “we have 18,000 police departments… [some of which need more training to] go after systemic racism, which is a reality, and to go after systemic bias,” she said.
“We’ve got to start once again respecting and treating each other with the dignity that every person deserves,” she said.
The statement echoed a tweet from Friday morning.
White Americans need to do a better job of listening when African Americans talk about the seen and unseen barriers you face every day.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 8, 2016
Critics will point out that neither Blitzer nor Clinton suggested that African-American communities have a role in reducing police-encounter deaths, with examples like Chicago, New York or Miami.
A November 2011 report by the Justice Department showed that young African-American men are just 1 percent of the population, yet are responsible for a disproportionate percentage of murders in the nation.
