WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Clinton’s remark can spark controversy in the United States because of historical tension between the federal government and local authorities, which control most police forces.
“I think that there should be some kind of national model, and the use-of-force standard would be part of that national model,” Clinton told the activists in October 2015, according to the transcript, released Friday.
An example is the racial division that surfaced following the 2014 death of Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager who was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
The US Department of Justice intervened with a series of lawsuits against that forced Ferguson’s police department to adopt reforms including hiring minority officers for its all-white force in the predominantly black city.
Ferguson also gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has become a force in US politics amid a spate of similar police shootings of minorities, many of them unarmed.
According to the meeting transcript, Clinton told the activists: “We've got to look at this whole violence situation broadly. And the police are an important, critical part of it. And therefore, how do we get police forces and police officers to protect folks without killing them, without harassing them, without oppressing them?”
Tension was apparent throughout the 27-page transcript, especially when Clinton suggested that police officials themselves would have to be part of any solution. Several activists in attendance responded by telling Clinton that they feared police, and that such fear was endemic in black communities.
“When we talk about policing and talk about police as pillars of safety in the community, I think that you need to recognize that for most folks who are black or brown, police are exactly the antithesis of that,” one activist told Clinton.
On Thursday, the Justice Department announced that it would begin collecting data on police shootings and other violent encounters with the public.
