Rashida Tlaib: Policing Is Built on ‘Structural Racism’

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on Monday addressed her call to outlaw the policing of neighborhoods and incarceration, claiming without evidence that law enforcement organizations are built on “structural racism.”

A partial transcript is as follows:

JOE MADISON: [Policing] is becoming a cash cow for a lot of communities. What I mean by this, as we saw in Ferguson, you over-police a community, the poor end up paying fines, they end up going to court. There are a lot of folks making a lot of money, from the judges to the clerks on this whole criminal policing apparatus we have. Agree or disagree?

REP. RASHIDA TLAIB: Absolutely. Even in Detroit, $300 million dollars [goes] toward policing, toward the police department. Do you know how much we have toward public health? $8 million. We have a public health pandemic we weren’t ready for and we’re trying to handle it and address it, but even with all of that you wonder why 40 percent of the deaths, the statistics of been seeing out of Michigan of COVID, have been my black neighbors.

[…]

Enough with the constant pretending that more training is going to work. When Mr. Castile died in Minnesota, they invested $12 million in training. From George Floyd to now Daunte Wright, you see this constant push and then people throw up their hands, black and brown communities say enough. Even many of our white counterparts are calling my office saying, “Rashida, you’re right. I think we need to reimagine, we need to really think.” I said, “absolutely,” because police can’t be the answer to poverty, police can’t be the answer to all these ills in our country and can’t be the answer to addressing the fact that they were built on very much structural racism. Look at the history of policing in our country.