Cory Booker calls for supporting police, but also recognizing ‘implicit racial bias’
In the aftermath of fatal police shootings of black men in Oklahoma and North Carolina, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., emphasized the need to “recognize, appreciate and even celebrate the sacrifices police officers make everyday” while still acknowledging the gravity of “these horrific incidents of police-involved shootings.”
Booker, who was speaking in a Wednesday interview with Yahoo News and Finance Anchor Bianna Golodryga, said, “It’s not in any way incongruent to be a big supporter of our police, … but also talk about that we have a real problem in this country with issues of implicit racial bias, with challenges when it comes to equal application of the law.”
He also slammed GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s claim that “African-American communities are absolutely in the worse shape that they’ve ever been in before.” Many said Trump’s comment ignored America’s history of slavery, segregation and other forms of repression.
“Donald Trump is counterfactual, ahistoric — in other words, he persistently lies and has no appreciation of history,” Booker said. “The way he talks, it’s a cacophony of painful resuscitation of our past where he’s calling out to the lesser angels of our nature.”
Trump’s name came up again in the discussion when it turned to the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey and the subsequent arrest of suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami. After Rahami was apprehended, Trump said police forces “know who a lot of these people are. They are afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling.”
Booker praised the “incredible heroism” of the police in capturing Rahami. But he maintained that the key to identifying would-be terrorists is not profiling but recognizing “the signs of people who are being radicalized and radical behavior — and that exists both in the Muslim community or somebody who wants to go into a black church and shoot people.”
The New Jersey lawmaker also spoke about his efforts, along with some of his Capitol Hill colleagues, to draw attention to voting rights and what he called the “unconscionable” efforts to suppress voting in some places in the country. He also criticized the “massive” disenfranchisement of denying felons convicted of nonviolent drug offenses the right to vote. Booker described some of their crimes as “literally doing things the last two presidents have admitted to doing.”
Booker mostly declined to comment on the upcoming trial of two former aides of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie who were caught up in the Bridgegate scandal. Prosecutors recently said Christie knew about the infamous bridge lane closes at the time. But Booker, who sometimes is seen as close to Christie, said, “Chris Christie’s not on trial here. I think we need to deal with it in that context, and if the authorities feel they need to bring charges against the governor, they should do that.”
