FBI director says racism not epidemic in police but is 'cultural inheritance' of US
|
Version 0 of 1. In the most sweeping remarks about police and racial tensions from a top US law enforcement official since a spate of controversial killings, the FBI director, James Comey, called on Thursday for a renewed conversation on community policing – without blaming cops for “endemic” racism. Directly invoking killings of unarmed black men in New York and Missouri as well as two police officers in an address at Georgetown University, in Washington DC, Comey said Americans must accept that racism is the country’s “cultural inheritance” and that police officers must “get out of their cars” to overcome deep mistrust. Comey’s remarks marked the first time an FBI director has spoken out on race and policing so prominently. His office was long held by J Edgar Hoover, who wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr, and Comey said he keeps attorney general Robert Kennedy’s approval of the wiretap order on his desk as a reminder of the agency’s mistakes. Law-enforcement experts welcomed the frank talk after criticism of President Barack Obama’s tempered remarks following the shooting of Michael Brown last August in Ferguson, Missouri. While addressing “unreliable” data on police shootings as well as body cameras and military-grade equipment, Comey offered few specific policy changes on the systemic issues that have become the stuff of taskforces and investigations from his bosses. After citing research that suggested “unconscious bias”, the FBI director spent nearly half his speech defending America’s local police forces – over which he has no direct authority – against criticisms that the bias was wholesale. “What we do next is what matters most,” Comey said. “But racial bias isn’t epidemic in those who join law enforcement any more than it is epidemic in academia or the arts.” “Law enforcement is not the root cause of problems in our hardest-hit neighborhoods,” he said. Those community issues, Comey said, “will not be solved by body cameras” – a reference to efforts by police departments in Ferguson and legislators in Washington to record police interactions with the citizens they are sworn to protect. Comey made impassioned calls for better federal data collection on police use of force and officer-involved shootings. The FBI’s “justifiable homicides” database is considered the best measure of cop killings in the US, but even the attorney general, Eric Holder, called the lack of comprehensive numbers “unacceptable” last month. “It’s ridiculous that I can’t tell you how many people are shot by police in this country right now,” the FBI director said in a question-and-answer session on Thursday. The frank tone was reminiscent of public remarks – widely criticized from within the law enforcement community – made by the New York mayor, Bill de Blasio, after a grand jury did not indict the officer involved in the chokehold death last year of Eric Garner. Related: Eric Holder: US Justice Department to launch study of racial bias in police forces Commentators also said there were “echoes of Eric Holder”, referring to the attorney general’s remarks after the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson but before local or federal investigations were complete. (Holder’s investigation still isn’t.) The MSNBC host Joy Reid tweeted that Comey was “being as blunt and forward leaning on race as I’ve ever heard someone in law enforcement be, besides Eric Holder himself”. “We are starting here a good dialogue,” Holder said in Ferguson in August, as Obama was coming under pressure from both sides for not speaking out directly on the killing and protests there. “But the reality is the dialogue is not enough. We need concrete action to change things in this country. That’s what I have been trying to do. That’s what the president has been trying to do.” As Obama’s task force on community policing nears a deadline for proposed reforms and trust in police remains at near-record lows, Comey attempted to push that dialogue forward. He quoted Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist, a song from the Broadway musical Avenue Q, but said officers and civilians of all races must overcome subconscious shortcuts. “The two young black men on one side of the street look like so many others that officer has locked up. Two white men on the other side of the street, even in the same clothes, do not,” Comey said. “The officer does not make the same association about the two white guys – whether the officer is white or black – and that drives behavior.” Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said he appreciated that Comey spoke about topics like “unconscious bias”, but would have liked to see a more forceful push for specifics. “What pleasantly surprised me was the attempt to cut through a lot of the oppositional rhetoric to try and get to what the core of the problems were in those hard truths,” Warren said. He said that Comey’s remarks failed to explain why police officers are not held accountable for these actions or why police groups turn against politicians. Warren also took issue Comey’s statements that said police officers develop such biases because they arrest more black people. “It is problematic and untrue to say racial bias stems from black criminality,” he added. “It’s actually that racial bias criminalizes black communities.” Comey also responded to questions about drug prosecution and police militarization, systemic issues in the law-enforcement community – if not directly under the FBI’s purview – that have come to the forefront in the last six months without federal reform. He said that paramilitary gear – the subject of renewed criticism after law enforcement used armored vehicles and tactical gear to respond to demonstrators in Ferguson – remained a necessity for police, who he said needed better training overall. “It’s about the training, the discipline and the judgment and how we use it,” Comey said. “It’s not about the stuff.” |