MSNBC Panelist: ‘The Public Should Not Trust Police Officers’

Saturday on MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” while discussing the recent police shooting in North Carolina, the co-director of Advancement Project, civil rights attorney Judith Browne Dianis, said,”the public should not trust police officers.”

Partial transcript as follows:

HOST JOY REID:  Judith, we do have, you know, there is case law that police officers are very much aware of. The Graham v. Connor case, which is the 1889 controlling case in situations like this. It says ‘The reasonableness of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene rather than 20/20 vision of hindsight’ that’s Chief Justice William Rehnquist. I found a write up in a police magazine that was counseling officers on how to frame a crime scene situation in which they are involved in a shooting along these lines. Why should the public trust police departments when officers know what to say, how to frame, how to put together the facts in such a way the officer will be exonerated almost every time?

DIANIS: Well Joy, I mean, this is the core of the problem is that the public should not trust police officers. These police departments, what they are doing and in Charlotte, it shows a beautiful story line for them. They are creating a narrative. They start off with framing the story from the very beginning, in the way that they what to frame it putting out the person who is the head of the police union and the police chief gets to say something. Then hey show a picture of an alleged gun at the scene. So they are creating a story. So they have created their context. So they tried to sway the public and potential jury in the their own way. But what the public wants, what Charlotte uprising is asking for is stop telling us the story and show us the story. Instead of you creating the continuous lies you think we should believe. So we don’t need more context. We need the actual video.

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