POLICING - Rebuilding Accountability and Trust

"How do communities increase accountability and rebuild trust after police shootings?" PBS NewsHour 2/10/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Around the nation, from Ferguson to Staten Island to Albuquerque, communities are grappling with the aftermath of deaths caused by police officers who used lethal force.  Gwen Ifill talks to Cornell William Brooks of the NAACP and Richard Berry of the International Association of Chiefs of Police about how to repair strained relations and curb the use of excessive force by law enforcement.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  A rookie New York City police officer was indicted today in the shooting death of an unarmed man in a Brooklyn housing project stairwell.  The victim, Akai Gurley, was described as a total innocent in the case.

New York is obviously not the only community grappling with the fallout from cases such as this.  Last night, we brought you a story about efforts to curb the use of similar lethal force in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

So what are communities doing about it?

For more on that, we turn to Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the NAACP, and Richard Beary, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Thank you both for joining me tonight.

Months later, after all the discussions of Ferguson and Staten Island, what progress are we making, Mr. — Reverend Brooks, in this and trying to get to policing reform?

CORNELL WILLIAM BROOKS, President, NAACP:  I’m hopeful that there is an emerging consensus as to both our ability to bring about policing reform and a concrete set of policy proposals.

So whether it be at the federal level in terms of passing the End Racial Profiling Act, which would tie federal funding to the training of police officers, so that they don’t engage in racial profiling, to the NAACP-supported and passage of the Death in Custody Act — up until a little while ago, you would ask the commonsense kind of question, how many police-involved homicides are there in the country, there’s no way to answer that question.

I believe we’re on our way to answering that question.  To more flexibility in terms of promoting — or appointing special prosecutors.  So there are a number of concrete proposals, reforms that we can pursue.  And all across the country, you’re seeing a young — a generation of practitioners of democracy, of protesting, are engaging in sit-ins and die-ins and who believe something could be done.