- Training is not enough.
We have to start having systems of accountability,
transparency into what's going on,
both for the officer's sake and for the community's sake.
- This pandemic has shed light on a number of inequities
that have existed far before this outbreak,
and police bias is among the latest
to be addressed by lawmakers.
Right now we have Senator Cory Booker
and Dr. Armen Henderson,
who experienced mistreatment firsthand.
So we'll jump right into it.
Senator Booker, what prompted you,
Kamala Harris, and the rest of your colleagues
to send this letter off to Attorney General Barr
and Chris Ray?
- Well, look, when those folks were getting appointed,
I'm on the Judiciary Committee,
I talked to them both very long
about implicit racial bias in policing.
You know, the number of police shootings in our country
are still unconscionably high,
and you have a lot of police leaders
talking about the problem of implicit racial bias.
A previous FBI Director admitting openly
that if I was walking down the street
and there were white kids on this side
and black kids on this side,
the FBI Director said I would be more afraid of
the black kids, and worried about the black kids.
And so now you add to the problem,
that this administration that came in,
they've stopped their accountability for police forces
like Obama was doing for cities all across America,
including Newark.
And now you have all these stories that I've started hearing
about young black men wearing masks,
as they're being instructed to do,
then having that becoming a trigger
for even more police action and police activity.
So, this is a problem that exists and could grow over time,
and we should be doing
nationwide implicit racial bias training period,
but we should be especially doing it now
with the challenges that are coming up
as a result of mask wearing.
- What's really interesting about this to me is,
because when this pandemic first began,
and we really saw that this was going to be a real issue,
you started hearing this commentary
about this becoming the great equalizer.
That something that affects so many people
would tie us or bind us together,
but what would happen,
and exactly what happened when Hurricane Irma hit,
the most at risk or vulnerable populations
end up bearing the brunt of it.
Can you speak to that a little bit more?
- Right, because everybody's like,
oh, we got to shelter in place,
but if you don't have a house,
if you live on the street,
then it's, it's pretty much impossible to do.
So we started providing tents and toiletries and masks,
and we started testing individuals,
and just making sure that people knew
what the pandemic was about.
They were educated about it, hand-washing techniques.
And then we, now we provide showers,
hand-washing stations and bathrooms as well.
- So why are you doing this work on April 10th?
What happened?
- So I mean, I was just putting tents in my car,
taking the tents out of Amazon boxes,
and putting them into my van,
when this police officer stopped in front of my van,
he had all these questions that he asked.
Do you live here?
Do you work here?
And what's going on with this trash?
And blah, blah, blah.
And so I answered the questions,
and I thought our conversation was over,
and he decided to jump out of the car.
And so when he jumped out of the car,
he basically asked me for ID,
and, you know, I'm trying,
I'm rushing to be somewhere,
to deliver tents to homeless individuals,
I had to be there in 30 minutes.
And so I just said, look,
I don't have my ID on me right now, which I didn't.
And then that's when he decided basically
to put me in handcuffs.
And when he put me in handcuffs, I called for my wife.
He took me to the front of the car
and decided to yell in my face without a mask on,
he didn't have any gloves on.
He detained me for no apparent reason.
He said I should call him sir, or Sergeant.
And I mean, at that point I was upset,
but I was really more so focused on what I had to do.
So I kind of just let it roll off of my shoulders,
and when my wife came out,
she basically was able to deescalate the situation.
Do you see how these situations can get out of hand
at any given moment?
And it looked like it was his whole MO to approach me
and to escalate the situation from the beginning.
And he was promoted to sergeant,
he has 12 use of force complaints.
He had six citizens' complaints.
- So Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris
have written a letter to the DOJ and the FBI
asking for anti-bias police training
in light of the pandemic.
What were your thoughts when you found out about
the letter that they sent,
and what do you think it'll take
to actually turn this issue on its head?
- It's not having anti-bias training,
it's actually holding individuals accountable.
It's looking at the system of policing.
- There's ways to use big data to actually see
if the training has changed the behavior.
And by the way,
it's the flip side of this as well.
When Obama did this with his 21st century
policing task force,
what they found out was,
is that there are predictive analytics.
That's a fancy term that means
looking at data, you can predict people's behavior.
And they found out they could predict situations
in which police misconduct would happen.
For example, one of the indicators they found
is that police officers who have a repeat of
a certain type of stressful situation,
are more likely to lash out
and have a police misconduct claim.
And that one of those particular types
of stressful situations is suicide calls.
You remember that Texas pool party,
where that little black girl was sat on
by that police officer?
That officer who sat on that little girl
had two suicide calls in the month before!
You know, are we instituting the kind of systems
that prevent that interaction?
And no, we're not.
And we have the capability of doing it.
- How do you think this pandemic will change the way
you govern and your colleagues govern moving forward?
- My prayer for us,
and I want to try to not just hope it happens,
but try to make it happen,
is that we expand our empathy, moral imagination,
and it translates into laws and policies that address this.
We've got to be a country on the constant march
to make real the promise of America for everybody.
So this is a crossroads in that
all of us have to be activists in that cause.
We cannot just hope it happens.