On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” presumptive Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated, “I’m going to be talking to white people. I think we’re the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries that are coming from our African-American fellow citizens,” and called for greater respect and protection for the police.
Hillary began by expressing her condolences over the “horrific” shooting of police officers in Dallas, TX, adding, “I also want us to remember that, just 24 hours before, we had a killing, with the loss of life, in Baton Rouge, in Minneapolis, and right before talking with you, it appears we had an additional event in Tennessee. This is deeply troubling, and it should worry every single American. You know, we’ve got to do much more, to listen to one another, respect each other. We’ve got to do everything possible to, you know, support our police, and support innocent Americans who have deadly encounters with the police.”
Hillary also repeated her call for national guidelines for the use of force by police, looking into implicit bias, and called for more respect and protection for the police and for people to put themselves in other peoples’ shoes. She later added, “I reiterate a call for national guidelines. We have 18,000 police departments. Some of them are very small. Some of them are not very well-trained. Some of them, you know, don’t really have the resources that are necessary to keep training and retraining. And, frankly, Wolf, to go after systemic racism, which is a reality, and to go after implicit bias.”
She concluded the discussion on policing and race with, “I have been involved in working to try to close the racial divide my entire adult life. I’ve worked on issues of criminal justice reform, incarceration, juvenile justice, for many decades, and I’m heartbroken that we have to keep repeating and doing that work year after year, but I am determined, and I am persistent. And 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 know, how to really protect themselves, when they’re the ones who should be expecting protection from encounters with the police. I’m going to be talking to white people. I think we’re the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries that are coming from our African-American fellow citizens, and we have so much more to be done, and we’ve got to get about the business of doing it. We can’t be engaging in hateful rhetoric, or incitement of violence. We need to be bringing people together, and I’ve said on the campaign trail repeatedly, we need more love and kindness, and I know that’s not usually what presidential candidates say, but I believe it, and I’m going to be speaking about it from now, all the way into the White House and beyond.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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