Against the backdrop of continued tensions between protesters of police violence and those who've responded to their dissent by coming to the defense of law enforcement, an exchange between two notable voices on opposite sides of the issue has been making the rounds on social media. The video shows Congressman Hakeem Jeffries from New York grilling Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke on his position on Black on Black crime, the "Blue Wall of Silence," and the use of excessive force by police in encounters with Black men.
The clip, which is taken from footage of a House Judiciary Committee Meeting dates back to May of 2015, by which time Sheriff Clarke had already begun to make a name for himself in the conservative political landscape, and right-wing media circuit, for speaking out against the Black Lives Matter movement. It is the final five and a half minutes of a hearing in which Clarke makes it known that he sees the killing of Black men by police as an issue that is blown out of proportion for political gain. More specifically, Clarke alleges an anti-police sentiment to be prevalent in the Black community and blames it in part for provoking combative encounters between cops and civilians.
"When law enforcement officers tell someone they're under arrest, and they can't use force to execute that arrest, we don't have the rule of law [when it's merely a suggestion for them], that they're going to jail or to put their hands behind their back," Clarke says in response to Jeffries bringing up the death of Eric Garner, whom the Congressman points out was not resisting arrest when he was taken down with the use of an illegal choke-hold in Staten Island, New York in 2014. Clarke disputed the notion that Garner didn't resist arrest, noting that he was told that he was under arrest, but wouldn't put his hands behind his back. "Those are behaviors, like in the instance of Mike Brown, in Ferguson Missouri, where some different choices by the individual could have helped the situation. In other words, Mike Brown was simply told to get out of the street."
Jeffries, who brought Garner's case to question as a means of contesting Clarke's dismissal of the most publicized cases of Blacks being killed by police as incidents charged by "false narratives," fired back by inferring that if anything it is Clarke's own narrative that doesn't fit the visual. "For you to come here and testify essentially, that Eric Garner is responsible for his own death when he was targeted by police officers for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, which is an administrative violation, for which he got the death penalty for, is outrageous," Jefferies said. "And if we are going to have a responsible conversation, we've got to be able to at least agree on a common set of reasonable facts that all American's can interpret, particularly in this instance, because they caught the whole thing on video tape."
Source: youtube.com
