On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The ED Show,” immediately following the announcement that a New York City Police Officer would not be indicted by a grand jury for a chokehold that resulted in the death of Eric Garner, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) reacted to the announcement.
In his reaction, Meeks likened the recent instances of police overstepping boundaries to the era of Bull Connor and the 1960s.
“Right now I think we have to call on all American citizens of every race, of every religion, of every gender, and I think we need to have peaceful demonstrations and let individuals know that we’ve got to make sure there is justice in America,” Meeks said. “There has to be. For example, I refer back to the 60s when you had Bull Conner and they were beating folks back then. And no police officer was being arrested. There was nobody that was getting indicted. Americas then came to say we got to save our country. Well, clearly if we have this kind of video tape and you have no indictment – but we need Americans to speak up and say that we don’t want this to happen because this is a violation of human rights right here in America when we talk about people having violations of human rights all over the world, and so we got to do it right here in America.”
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