‘We have policemen who are rogue, but the vast majority of policemen are wonderful…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Attorney General William Barr and several other top Trump administration officials are pushing back on the left-wing narrative that law enforcement is plagued by “systemic racism.”
“I think there’s racism in the United States still, but I don’t think that the law enforcement system is systemically racist,” Barr told CBS News this weekend.
“I understand the distrust, however, of the African–American community [toward authorities] given the history in this country,” he added.
The comments came amid an alarming new push from Democrats to defund police departments. It is unclear what local municipalities would do to preserve law and order instead, but one Minneapolis city counselor claimed that it was a “privilege” to be able to rely on police.
Simultaneously, leftist leaders have advocated for widespread prison releases, particularly in the wake of the recent coronavirus panic.
The U.S. has been reforming its institutions to better promote equality since the 1960s, Barr argued, and although the criminal-justice system isn’t perfect, it has come a long way in ensuring that government institutions are “in sync with our laws and aren’t fighting a rearguard action to impose inequities.”
Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf also dismissed the narrative that racism runs rampant in law enforcement, arguing that abuses committed of a select few cops doesn’t make every cop a racist.
“Painting law enforcement with a broad brush of systemic racism is really a disservice to the men and women who put on the badge, the uniform every day, risk their lives every day to protect the American people,” Wolf told ABC News.
Similarly, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, a self-made African American who raised himself up from the poverty of inner-city Detroit to become a world-renowned brain surgeon, rejected the idea that systemic racism is something to fear.
Carson, whose autobiographical memoir Gifted Hands was turned into a movie staring Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr., reminded Americans that he grew up in a time when there was “real systemic racism.”
“We have policemen who are rogue,” he said. “But the vast majority of policemen are wonderful.”
Democrats, on the other hand, have spent the past week accusing law enforcement of disproportionately targeting African Americans.
Presidential candidate Joe Biden, himself rebounding from racially offensive remarks just thee days before the Memorial Day death of George Floyd launched nationwide race riots, asserted that black citizens naturally fear for their safety from “bad police.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whose state Floyd died in and where the riots first originated, denounced the “stain of fundamental, institutional” racism that plagues police departments.
However, there is little evidence that supports this charge, according to conservative scholar Heather Mac Donald, who explained in the Wall Street Journal that the statistics simply do not support the “systemic racism” narrative.
According to the data, black Americans killed by cops represent 0.1% of all African Americans killed in 2019, Mac Donald wrote. By contrast, a police officer is 18 times more likely to be killed by a black male.
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.