‘…you’re dealing with people that apparently have that kind of venom…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Rev. Al Sharpton said on Wednesday that police officers would continue to act in a “demonic fashion” if they are not charged and/or convicted in cases of police brutality.
Sharpton’s comments came on the heels of the Senate GOP’s police reform bill, which discourages police departments against using forceful tactics such as chokeholds, but does not ban these practices altogether.
Sharpton, like many other Democrats, said that this isn’t enough.
“This is not a climate to be talking about suggesting and incentivizing police to do what is right. This is about enforcing the law,” Sharpton told MSNBC. “They need to be prosecuted and incarcerated. The law must work, and I think this puts more pressure on the Senate and the president to deal with this.”
Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., who spearheaded the Senate GOP’s legislative efforts, has said that more training, not less, is the answer to law enforcement’s problems.
But Sharpton said that better training won’t make a difference “when you’re dealing with people that apparently have that kind of venom and that kind of feeling about human beings that they’re dealing with.”
“There’s some deep-seated venom and a deep sense we’re less than human with what we’re dealing with here,” he said. “I think policemen, like every other citizen, must know they will go to jail. They will pay the ultimate price. But as long as they feel that they can operate in a way as inhumane as this is, as vicious as this is … they’ll walk out of court. They will operate in the same demonic fashion.”
Many black Americans, including Sharpton, have said that the death of George Floyd is proof that systemic racism exists with in law enforcement.
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 myth.”
The Trump administration has also pushed back on accusation of injustice and discrimination, arguing that a few rogue policemen should not discredit the “vast majority of policemen who are wonderful,” according to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who raised himself up from the poverty of inner-city Detroit to become a world-renowned brain surgeon.