Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton acknowledged a “reasonable fear” that the recent spate of police officers ambushed and killed will overshadow law enforcement misconduct, even as she denounced both at the NAACP convention.
“There are people all across America sick over what happened in Baton Rouge and in Dallas but also fearful that the murders of police officers means that vital questions about police-community relations will go unanswered,” Clinton said Monday. “Now that is a reasonable fear, isn’t it? And all of this tells us very powerfully that we have to change …. but it can only happen if we build trust and accountability. And let’s admit it, that gets harder every time someone else is killed.”
Those remarks followed an extended condemnation of the recent attacks on police. “This madness has to stop,” she said. “They represent the rule of law itself. If you take aim at that, and at them, you take aim at all of us.”
But Clinton also emphasized that she recognizes an “implicit bias” in police departments and across society that is hamstringing black communities. “We cannot rest until we root out implicit bias and stop the killings of African-Americans,” she said.
Clinton cited several examples of that, such as the need to establish national guidelines on the use of force by law enforcement, the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and policies that make it more difficult for felons to find jobs once they are released from prison. “I will ban the box in the federal government,” she said. “People deserve a real shot at an interview instead of being told no right out of the gate.”
Other domestic policy priorities figured into the speech, such as gun control — “people who care about protecting police officers should be committed to getting assault weapons off the street to start with” — including issues beyond the justice system, such as healthcare. Clinton noted “that black kids are 500 percent more likely to die of asthma than white kids,” for instance.
“Imagine if those numbers were reversed and it were white kids dying; imagine the outcry and the resources that would flood in,” she said.
