Another Trump administration official asserted that systemic racism is not a large-scale issue within law enforcement in the United States.
“I do not think that we have a systemic racism problem with law enforcement officers across this country,” acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf argued Sunday on ABC’s This Week.
“Do I acknowledge that there are some law enforcement officers that abuse their job? Yes, and again, we need to hold those accountable. And I would say that there are individuals in every profession across this country that probably abuse their authority and their power, and we need to hold them accountable,” he continued.
He added that there are “absolutely” instances in which police officer need to do better but argued that “painting law enforcement with a broad push of systemic racism is really a disservice to the men and women who put on the badge, the uniform every day and risk their lives every day to protect the American people.”
President Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien expressed similar sentiments last week after protests erupted across the country after George Floyd, an unarmed black man, died after a white police officer knelt on his neck as Floyd said he couldn’t breathe.
O’Brien denied that systemic racism exists in the nation’s law enforcement agencies and blamed “some bad apples” for the deaths of unarmed black men in police custody but said “99.9% of our law enforcement officers are great Americans.”
Following Wolf’s comments, Rep. Val Demings, a Democrat and former police chief, said members of the Trump administration are not being honest about the problems facing the country.
“We know that we have been fighting systemic racism in this country for 400 years,” Demings, who is black, told This Week. “We know that it has reared its ugly head in law enforcement agencies, in housing, in education, and too many other places.”
“Systemic racism is always the ghost in the room,” she said.
