Tuesday at the White House daily briefing, White House correspondent and political analyst for The Daily Banter, liberal commentator Tommy Christopher, asked how the White House can justify calling the estimated 900,000 sworn law enforcement officers serving in the United States, good cops when in the few recent incidents involving less than a dozen officers, none of those officers did the right thing?
Christopher asked, “Something I’ve hear him [President Obama] say and I’ve heard you say on a number of occasions, in the context of those incidents, the overwhelming majority of police officers act properly and are good and honest. And I’m wondering when you look at the Freddie Gray incident and Walter Scott, incident after incident not a single officer intervenes on behalf of these citizens. We haven’t seen a single incident where a police officer other than the ones participating in the event have acted properly and intervened on behalf of citizens. So I’m wondering on what basis you and the president make that statement, in that context, not withstanding what happened in Texas, when they are put to this test, when police officers are committing violence against unarmed citizens. Why would anybody think the overwhelming majority of them are good when we see evidence not a single one of them has been.”
Press secretary Josh Earnest replied, “There are tens of thousands, if not hundred of thousands of hours of video footage collected every single day, by dashboard-cams, by body-cams by security cameras, that monitor or at least are capturing the work of our law enforcement officers. And I think that is an indication that the snipits that we do see are serious and are cause for significant concern. But do not reflect the actions and professionalism of the vast majority of law enforcement officers who pursue their work in a professional way.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.