CNN has gone in whole hog on police and racism since Ferguson, as the interviews below demonstrate. I’m sure there’s more interviews like this, but these two CNN interviews stood out to me as they were both done today.
First, we have a civil rights attorney talking about a survey she did back in the 1990s of 900 cops in Los Angeles where she said that many of them admitted to her they were scared of black people and black men. The suggestion here is that they are white cops, but she admitted that some black cops also had negative thoughts when show black images, whatever that means. She also added that both black and Asian cops said they were scared of hispanics. She claims we have an “inter-tribal problem” among our police officers:
Secondly, we have a former St. Louis police officer who claims that most of the cops he knew were “deeply racist” or something:
You know, cops deal primarily with criminals, no matter what color they are, and it’s understandable that they will develop certain notions about certain communities based on experience. In fact I would expect them to have a certain level of fear approaching any situation, especially considering how volatile they can be.
Now are there racist cops? Probably. I’ve never met one but given that they are human like the rest of us it seems likely.
But here’s what I can’t get past. Whether it be Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown or Eric Garner, race was not an issue in either of these incidents no matter how you come down on the grand jury decisions. If we had actual incidents of racism here I’d be a lot more empathetic but as of right now this whole discussion is intellectually dishonest.
But hey, CNN doesn’t need facts to jump on the racial bandwagon. Let’s just paint cops as racist and the consequences be damned.