Rinku Sen: Blue Alert System For Cops A ‘Distraction,’ ‘Creates A False Equivalency’

Rinku Sen, President and Executive Director of Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation argued that the nationwide “Blue Alert” system signed into law by President Obama to give police officers warnings about threats “feels like a distraction” and “creates a false equivalency in the storyline about deaths of police officers and deaths caused by police officers” on Saturday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry.”

Sen said, “What worries me about the Blue Alert system actually, is that it may or may not be so helpful in resolving threats against police officers. There is already a lot of attention if officers are killed or harmed. And I worry that this particular move creates a false equivalency in the storyline about deaths of police officers and deaths caused by police officers. And those two things are not equal numerically. The Washington Post reported earlier this month that there have been ten officers killed in the course of this year nationally. In Los Angeles alone, the LAPD has killed 14 people in that same period of time. A great number of the people killed by the police are going to be women, and trans people, and LGBT people. So, I think that that notion of what are equivalent crimes here and what requires systemic attention is really the way in which the Blue Alert system feels like a distraction to me in a debate that has many dimensions and many explicitly racial and gender dimensions.”

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