Maxine Waters: Violent Protests ‘Minor’ — Policing ‘Tradition’ Has to Be ‘Done Away With’

Monday on MSNBC’s “The Beat,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said the Black Lives Matter protesters were pushing change in current policing, which she said had a tradition that had to be “done away with.”

Waters said, “I want to tell you, without the kind of protests that we have seen, we would not have so many people saying ‘Oh, my goodness, things have got to change.’ And that’s not simply black people it’s white and all races taking to the streets and young people taking to the streets. We saw everything out there. We saw Asians. We saw Indians. We saw blacks. We saw whites, etc. No, this change and this talk of change would not be happening without the kind of protests that we have witnessed..”

She continued, “You know, people don’t like protests. They’re afraid of protests. Of course, this is what is guaranteed to us by our Constitution that we should be able to do. And sometimes all of the attention is on the violence that sometimes is caused or some of the wreckage that’s caused by some of the protesters, but that is minor in relationship to the numbers who are on the positive side of this and talking about change.”

She added, “Tradition has not worked for us. So what you’re talking about paying attention to a police chief or your city council members who are saying they just can’t get it done, or your mayors who are elected, you know, these police chiefs and don’t want to be accountable to them, all of that was tradition, and that’s got to be done away with. The only way it’s going to happen is with the protests of people taking to the streets in the ways we have witnessed.”

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