Fox News Channel “Red Eye” panelist Andy Levy said that conservatives should be concerned by the “disgusting” report on the practices of the Ferguson Police Department on Saturday.
After host Tom Shillue said “looks like the Ferguson story just got real” in regards to the two police officers shot in the city, Levy responded, “I don’t understand why you think Ferguson just got real when those [censored] shot the cops. Ferguson, if you didn’t think it was real before then, you should have thought it was real when the DOJ report came out.”
Levy and Shillue did agree that the DOJ’s report into the Mike Brown incident proved that the “hands up, don’t shoot” slogan was inaccurate, Levy then said that “the DOJ report also came out telling them the fact that they thought the cops and the whole damn town structure — city structure was racist was, in fact, 100% true.”
Shillue disagreed, asking “why? Because they gave out a bunch of traffic tickets…I was very unimpressed,” Levy counted “Everything in that report was utterly reprehensible and for any conservative who walks around talking the Constitution constantly…the Fourth Amendment violations, the First Amendment violations, much more of which were done against black people than white people, that sh*t was disgusting.”
Radio host Anthony Cumia said that those on the left were picking and choosing which evidence to pay attention to, although he did refer to the report on the Ferguson PD as “reprehensible,” and one that showed “the police department was racist.” Although he said he thought the Ferguson PD’s practices were “more a moneymaking scheme than it was ‘let’s be racist.'”
Criminal defense attorney Remi Spencer argued that “this is shining a spotlight on the kinds of problems that we see throughout this country. They’re pervasive.” And that where she practices in New Jersey, “there is not a representative class of people in law enforcement for the community.”
Shillue countered that “people have an idea that there — that there’s police misconduct that’s rampant across the country, and they’re going to write that story whether it’s true or not, and it wasn’t true in this case–” a point both Spencer and Levy disputed before he clarified that he was referring to the Brown case, not the larger practice of the Ferguson Police Department. Levy did agree that “hands up, don’t shoot” “absolutely wasn’t true,” but “the police corruption was 100% true.”
Fellow host Joanne Nosuchinsky then weighed in, stating “now people are protesting — it’s the emotion that comes from that, it is the bias that they are feeling, not just from that one incident, but like Andy said, because of this report, because of the repeated actions that have been taken by this police department, which, unfortunately, does happen in happen in other parts of the world.”
Cumia then asked “can you say, honestly, though, by looking at a report and seeing that more — 87% of the people that need to be restrained [page 28 of the report says that “the overwhelming majority of force—almost 90%—is used against African Americans”] during arrest were black, can that absolutely be racist? Or can that absolutely be that 87% of the people that they arrested that were black were resisting.”
Spencer responded with “you can also look at the use of excessive force reports [the DOJ’s findings on excessive force also begin on page 28 of the report] that are filed by these police officers and how many of the people who are being arrested end up the in the emergency room.” Levy added “they had the stats where people — getting stopped in cars who then had — were searched and black people were searched much more often than white people, but white people were more likely, on a percentage level to be holding contraband [this finding is on page 4 of the DOJ report]. So, yeah, you can say that there is — that it’s racial bias.”
Shillue then said that Ferguson is a “majority black city” it wasn’t surprising to see that more black people were involved with law enforcement, Levy argued back “the numbers didn’t equal the percentages of people, so the numbers should have been surprising [this finding is also on page 4 of the report].” And “it was police misconduct, it wasn’t that black people were committing more crimes, it was the way the police were treating black people, etc. The majority of people in Ferguson, in my opinion, are peacefully protesting conditions they believe are systemically racist, and that belief, to me, was 100% born out by the DOJ report.”
(h/t Mediaite)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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