After a week of high-profile violence perpetrated both by and against police officers, leaders across the country issued ritual calls for calm and made broad declarations about the need for police officers and the communities where they work to come to some sort of mutual understanding. To “stop talking past each other” and to be “partners” in a conversation about the country’s racial tensions.
If it all sounds very familiar, that’s because we’ve heard it before. In the wake of the Michael Brown shooting and the protests that followed in Ferguson, Missouri. After Eric Garner’s death after being placed in a chokehold by police and the protests that followed. After Freddie Gray. After Tamir Rice. After so many, many others.
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Now we’ve begun to hear it again after five police officers guarding a protest against police violence against black Americans were gunned down in Dallas last week by a black man seeking to retaliate against white police. Then, on Saturday night, people were arrested by the scores in Minnesota and Louisiana, when protests of last week’s police shootings of two African American men turned violent or disruptive.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who was the Obama administration’s envoy to the Sunday talk shows this morning, may have set a record for banality in his analysis of the situation.
“Violence never solves anything,” he said. “An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind, and this is a time to heal, a time to come together, a time to mourn”
It’s all become so repetitive, in fact, that it’s a testament to the self-control of Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that he didn’t beat his head on the desk Sunday morning when Face the Nation host John Dickerson asked him to talk about what needs to be done. Because, as he explained, we already do know -- we just aren’t doing it.
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“Everybody on both sides is saying don't paint the other with a broad brush,” Dickerson said. “Help people understand how to talk about the changes you think need to be made in the police force, but then also respect these people who are brave and take risks and serve their community.”
“We're at a moment where we know what to do,” Brooks said. “The president has issued his task force -- recommendations from his 21st Century Policing Task Force. The NAACP issued a report called "Born Suspect." We have police departments that know how to get it right. We just have to develop the will to get it right.”