RAHM EMANUEL’S CHICAGO: Fired Chicago Police Superintendent Blasts Obama, Lynch.
He said that politicians and political leaders have characterized data-driven policing as systemic racism, but according to McCarthy, the issue is a flawed economic system that disenfranchises African-American communities. Police, he said, have been repeatedly used as the poster child for questionable interactions involving African-Americans in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, Dallas and St. Louis.
He said that disenfranchised communities suffer from poverty and lack family structure, education, resources, optimism, healthcare and public services. These communities also deal with rampant narcotics activity and rampant alcohol abuse, he said, calling it a broken landscape that creates legal cynicism. That cynicism fuels the belief that the law and its agents are ill-equipped to ensure public safety, he said.
“It’s an indictment of the entire system of government that is not providing what those communities need. Look at Flint, Mich. Look at what happened there,” he said. “You don’t see state’s attorneys on the street. You don’t see U.S. attorneys on the street. You don’t see elected officials on the street, unless they’re campaigning, of course.”
What’s exacerbating the problem, he said, is public reaction to questionable incidents involving police and minority groups.
“We’ve misdiagnosed the problem,” he said. “The problem in this country is not the police. The problem in this country is a social and economic divide that puts people in those disenfranchised communities in the positions that they’re in. In essence, we’re taking the wrong medicine for what ails us.”
Turning the police into well-armed social workers was always doomed to fail.
