Jemele Hill Claims the Police Were Never Designed to Protect Black People

Jemele Hill
Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Former ESPN talker and left-wing writer Jemele Hill told an audience at Vanderbilt University that the police in the U.S.A. were not designed to protect blacks.

Hill was invited to the school to serve as the keynote speaker for the 15th annual Murray Lecture. In the wake of the release of the video of the police-involved death of Tyre Nichols, the grievance writer blasted police with both barrels, according to The Tennessean.

“If that young man was white, do you think they would have beat him like that,” Hill asked her audience. “It wouldn’t have happened. Not at all. It wasn’t the race of the officers that mattered, it was the race of the victim that mattered.”

Photo of Tyre Nichols is displayed outside the sanctuary during church service at Mt. Olive Cathedral CME Church on January 29, 2023 in Memphis,...

A photo of Tyre Nichols is displayed outside the sanctuary during church service at Mt. Olive Cathedral CME Church on January 29, 2023, in Memphis, Tennessee. ( Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

She added that the police were designed to oppress black people in America.

“When you’re critiquing the policing in America, you’re critiquing a system. A system that was designed to do unfortunately the outcome that we have seen, this young man losing his life,” she exclaimed. “The police were never, by design, supposed to protect black people.”

Hill went on to slander the U.S. system of policing with the standard left-wing narrative that police were invented to keep slaves in line and tied policing to “slave patrols,” a claim that has been debunked repeatedly.

“Notice when you go back and you look at footage from the Civil Rights Movement and the marches and the protests. Go back and look at Bloody Sunday,” she added.

“So there’s a very diabolical history,” Hill said. “It has continued.”

Activists held a rally on Boston Common in front of the Massachusetts State House in reaction to the killing of Tyre Nichols.

Activists held a rally on Boston Common in front of the Massachusetts State House in reaction to the killing of Tyre Nichols. (John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

This is far from the first time Hill has heaped such calumny against the police. She made the same false accusation likening police to “slave patrols” back in 2017.

The truth is, though, slave patrols were not “police departments.” Indeed, most of the earliest actual police departments were formed in northern states, such as New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. Further, most of the police departments that exist today were formed in the decades following the abolition of slavery, the New York Post reported.

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