Claire McCaskill: Pitting protesters against police “very unfair” to most police officers

By Meredith Shiner

A “narrative” that pits protestors against police in cities like Ferguson has been “harmful” and “very unfair” to most police officers, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said Tuesday.

In a wide-ranging interview, the Missouri Democrat told Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric that it would be “naïve” to think that years of institutional bias against African Americans could be reversed in the 12 months since Michael Brown’s death in her home state. On Monday, St. Louis County authorities declared a state of emergency in Ferguson after gunfire broke out during the protests marking the one-year anniversary of Brown’s killing.

“This whole narrative of protesters versus police has been harmful in so many ways, and in many ways very unfair to most of the police officers that I’ve had the honor to work with, because most of them want to be of the community, not in an adversarial position against the community,” McCaskill said. “But the system has created this and now we have got to figure out a way to unwind it.”

McCaskill’s comments — in which she expressed frustration that “a few bad actors… have grabbed the headlines” — came on the one-year anniversary of the protests that engulfed the Missouri town of Ferguson and kicked off a national “Black Lives Matter” movement protesting Brown’s death and the disproportionate number of young black men killed in encounters with police.

“I say all this and it sounds like I am trying to minimize what’s going on there — I don’t mean to do that — but I’ve watched in frustration when the narrative has gotten out ahead of itself in terms of what’s really going on on the ground,” McCaskill said.

Signs of progress in Missouri since Brown’s death, McCaskill said, include: An increase in black members on Ferguson’s city council, the installation of an African American at the head of the town’s police department, municipal court reform in St. Louis County and expanded job training programs. But criminal justice system, she said, still needed to be reformed — and that is going to take time.

“This is something that’s taken years to become an institutional bias, we can’t be naive enough to think we’re going to fix it in twelve short months,” McCaskill said.

She also called for increased community policing and for more resources to be directed to departments so they can devote more time to engaging with communities, in addition to responding to 9-1-1 calls.

McCaskill said real fear exists in communities that are currently being underserviced: “These are hard-working, God-loving people who live in neighborhoods where sometimes they feel like their children need to sleep in bathtubs to be safe.”

Black Lives Matter protesters have attracted headlines at several recent events where they have disrupted Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, and while McCaskill did not discuss what sort of impact these issues might have on the 2016 election, she did talk about the emerging Republican field, which she dubbed a “circus.”

And if that “circus” had a ringleader, it would seem to be billionaire real estate magnate Donald Trump.

“I worry about strength and stability as it relates to our position on the world stage with somebody like Donald Trump and I think when it’s all over, the vast majority of Americans will feel the same way,” she said.

McCaskill said Trump’s inflammatory remarks against women have served to detract attention from anti-woman policies embraced by other candidates vying for the GOP nomination, and like Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton did earlier this week, McCaskill zeroed in on Senate colleague Marco Rubio of Florida.

“Marco Rubio said that he no longer supported a rape or incest exception to abortion restrictions. That — in any other context, when you didn’t have this circus around Trump — would have gotten a lot more coverage and I think that would have been shocking to most women in this country, that a major candidate for president would say that there should be no exception for rape or incest.”

The Democratic senator went even further by saying there is a “real danger” that Roe v. Wade could be overturned, “depending on the health of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other justices who are certainly not young at this point.” But, she added, she did not believe Republicans in Congress would be able to defund Planned Parenthood.

On the other hot congressional topic of the day, McCaskill said she is undecided on the Iran deal, though she has spoken to “friend” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., since he came out in opposition to the international agreement. She said she will take the 60-day review period to make her final decision and is weighing all concerns against the potential benefits of the deal.

She specifically addressed the idea that sanctions as an alternative to the multilateral agreement could fail because there would be no way to bind other nations to those sanctions after walking away from the agreement the United States negotiated with them.

“I’m trying to figure out if they’re going to get the money anyway. Since we don’t hold the money, that if we walk away from this deal, that the world agreed to, that those countries are going to release that money to Iran anyway and then they would be racing to a nuclear weapon with $60 billion.”