Loretta Lynch hopes ‘National Night Out’ will guide police-community partnerships

By Michael Walsh / Yahoo News

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch sounded off Wednesday on the uneasy state of relations between law enforcement and minority communities in the U.S. It was one of several topics Lynch addressed in a wide-ranging conversation with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric in Detroit.

Heart-wrenching videos of police shootings of apparently unarmed black men, as well as the ambush attacks of law enforcement officers, have shaken the news cycle during the past few months. Lynch told Couric that all of the deaths have been emotionally difficult to observe.

“We’re at a point now where we are seeing a lot of very difficult experiences that are hard to look at,” Lynch said. “They’re very, very hard to look at. It’s hard to watch anyone lose their life on a video. It’s hard to watch the aftermath of a police ambush and know that those officers are never going to see their families again.”

But these troubling videos, she continued, give Americans the opportunity to get past asking whether these horrifying incidents are happening to actually working toward solutions.

According to Lynch, several local law enforcement agencies have been doing positive work to address these issues and have found success implementing the suggestions offered in the final report from President Barack Obama’s 21st Century Task Force on Policing.

Still, she continued, other cities want to do a better job but don’t know where to start. She said those cities are asking the U.S. Justice Department about steps they can take.

That’s part of the reason Lynch participated in National Night Out, an annual campaign to strengthen community-police partnerships, this week in Detroit. On Wednesday, she launched a series of regional forums — involving community leaders, city officials and local residents — on policing in the United States.

Couric asked Lynch to address the criticism that these events are nice photo opportunities but do not actually address the underlying issues or produce tangible solutions.

Lynch said it’s been beneficial to set up citizens’ advisory councils so police can be more transparent about various issues, such as how they train or recruit officers. She also said it’s helpful to have youth advisory councils, because teenagers will tell authorities exactly what they think and won’t be afraid to tell well-meaning but misguided elected officials when a program designed to connect with young people won’t meet its goal.

De-escalation training, she said, is one of the most promising aspects of healing the wounds between police and local communities.

“We at the department obviously make that a part of work, if we have a department that’s under investigation or scrutiny,” Lynch said. “But what’s also very encouraging are police departments who come to DOJ and say, ‘You know what? My use-of-force policy hasn’t been updated in some time. And I’m concerned. I’m concerned that I might be sitting on a powder keg like other cities. Can you look at it and give me some guidance?’”

Couric asked Lynch whether there should be a system of independent prosecutors who investigate police misconduct. Lynch said accountability should begin in the police departments themselves.

“You know, there’s a lot of different ways to approach that. I think that whatever system a jurisdiction chooses to have, it has to be as transparent as possible,” Lynch said. “It has to be a system that people in the community understand and feel invested in and feel has a process of listening to their needs and addressing their concerns fairly and openly.”

The nation’s top law enforcement official also discussed her ill-advised meeting with former President Bill Clinton, as well as the FBI director’s piercing statements about Hillary Clinton’s email use.

Lynch met with the former president in June while federal investigators were looking into whether classified material was mishandled in connection to Hillary Clinton’s email account. Clinton exclusively used a private email server for official business while serving as secretary of state.

Lynch has said previously that her conversation with Bill Clinton was “largely social,” leading Couric to ask about the nonsocial parts of the discussion.

“Well, that was a large part of it. He talked about his travels and what he’d been doing in Phoenix. And I talked a little bit about my travels. You know, we both are acquainted with former Attorney General Janet Reno,” she said. “We talked about our concerns for her health.”

Lynch continued: “But I can tell you that it was — as I said before — it was and it was actually a very moving discussion about how the grandchildren met and all of that. Lengthy but moving — and very warm, very warm.”

Calling Bill Clinton “such a political animal,” Couric suggested that people find it difficult to imagine that he did not mention politics at all in the middle of campaign season.

“No, no. Well, I — no, we did not,” Lynch said.

At the time, some Republicans speculated that there might have been some sort of quid pro quo going on during the meeting. GOP nominee Donald Trump and others suggested a deal was made to keep Lynch on as attorney general in Hillary Clinton’s potential administration.“I can’t control how other people view things. All I can do is discuss my actions and explain my actions in them,” Lynch said. “And that’s another reason why I felt it was important to talk about my role in the investigation — and indicate that there was no discussion of anything like that. But D.C. is a political town. And that is how people tend to think about things. It’s not the lens that I always use. But I understand that some people choose to use that lens. And that’s their choice.”

Only July 7, before the House Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill, FBI Director James Comey testified that Clinton had been “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information and described several of her statements regarding the matter as “not true.” Still, he said, the FBI did not find sufficient evidence to suggest that Clinton had broken the law.

Comey’s strongly worded censure of Clinton prompted questions about whether he had overstepped his bounds.

Matthew Miller, former director of the Justice Department’s public affairs office, wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post arguing that Comey “violated time-honored Justice Department practices for how such matters are to be handled and set a dangerous precedent for future investigations and committed a gross abuse of his own power.”

When presented with this passage, Lynch said the Justice Department is aware that the matter is of great public interest and that it is looking for ways to be transparent and open with the American people.

“But we learn from these experiences. And we learn from that. And I view his actions as trying to provide a context for the discussions that we were later going to be having in confidence and that we were not going to be able to talk about or discuss publicly. Because they did concern an ongoing matter. And they did concern very private recommendations.”

The Justice Department, she said, understands it can be frustrating for people when they are not given the reasoning behind a decision, so the department is always looking for ways to provide context. She added that Comey was trying to describe the process of an investigation without going into the facts of the case.

“Again, in the absence of that, people will seize on that — and have — and tried to essentially use his comments as if they were the underlying facts of the investigation,” Lynch said. “But as I said before, we’re always trying to find ways in which we can explain to people not just what we do but how we do it. And it’s all a learning process.”

Lynch repeatedly declined to comment on statements made by Clinton or Trump, saying it would be inappropriate for the attorney general to sound off on political campaign issues. She said her department works hard to make sure that people understand that its role is independent of the political scene.

“Is it hard to stay that independent?” Couric asked.

“No, no, it’s not,” Lynch replied. “Because what we do is focusing on making sure that whatever the issue is, whatever the case is, we handle it in exactly the same way. And we have to do it in that way so that people do have confidence in our work.”

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