On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “At This Hour,” Dallas Police Deputy Chief Malik Aziz stated, “I think across the nation, officers are feeling under siege,” and “We need to come together. Black Lives Matter, police need to come together, community, politicians, and we need to resolve this.”
Aziz said, “Well, I think across the nation, officers are feeling under siege, because how many times, even if we look at what the numbers say…when people pull out those things, and we say that 98% of us do it right, and 98% of 800,000 officers go across this nation, in big cities as large as Dallas, a heavy community policing effort, a direction of interaction and engagement. And we do these things in this city and across the nation, and we try to do them right, and we try to strive for perfection. But sometimes we make errors. Sometimes, things don’t go the way they should. And we should be held accountable. And that is what we have a criminal justice system for, so we can be held accountable. So, officers across the nation, it means so much when someone says, ‘Thank you’ or ‘We appreciate what you do,’ because officers don’t hear that.”
He added, “[W]hat we need now is a real engagement, a real dialogue with the community, that we can no longer be separate. We can’t divide ourselves. The community needs the police, and the police need the community. We are one and the same. We have a 50/50 partnership. And we have to sit at the table, to see what is the best way forward, and we’re not doing that. We have devolved into some separatism, and we’ve taken our corners, and our fight to a corner, in every avenue in the United States now, that we don’t seem to want to work together. And in Dallas, it’s been a really concerted effort for us to work together with the community, for us to get out and build bridges with people, and make sure we have looked into 21st century policing. We’ve looked at the points. We was involved in — I personally was involved in the testifying in Cincinnati about 21st century policing. The president has given us a directive. We need to come together. Black Lives Matter, police need to come together, community, politicians, and we need to resolve this.”
Aziz concluded, “It’s all of us together, and if we don’t wake up, and we don’t realize what’s going on, then these things are becoming the norm, and we don’t need this to become the norm. We need to thank police officers. We need to understand that citizens have rights, and we are engaged, and we want better communities. We want safer communities where we live, work, and our children play, and we want police officers to go home, and we want citizens to go home to their family, and we want to feel for everyone.”
(h/t Daily Caller)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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