Bratton Says Police To Blame For ‘Worst Parts’ Of Black History, But Reform Advocates Are Unimpressed

New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton acknowledged on Tuesday that police were to blame for “many of the worst parts of black history” in the United States. Yet advocates for police reform say the comments are merely lip service from an official who continues to reinforce the city’s racial tensions.

Bratton gave a speech Tuesday morning to a predominantly African-American crowd during a Black History Month breakfast at the Greater Allen AME Church in Queens.

“Slavery, our country’s original sin, sat on a foundation codified by laws enforced by police, by slave-catchers,” Bratton said.

The commissioner pointed out that the first thing Dutch colonist Peter Stuyvesant did upon arriving in what was then New Amsterdam was set up a police force to prop up a system of slavery.

“We’re not fooled by what comes out of Bratton’s mouth as much as we’re focused on what he does,” Trujillo said, citing concerns about Bratton’s decision to police protests with machine guns and about the commissioner’s support of an effort to make resisting arrest a felony.

“He’s the Bull Connor of our day,” Trujillo added, referring to Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, the infamous Alabama segregationist who led the Birmingham police department throughout the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Bratton’s remarks come less than two weeks after FBI Director James Comey gave a speech on race and law enforcement. In that address, Comey acknowledged that police forces have historically enforced “a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups,” and that today, “lazy” racial biases still affect the way minorities are policed.

The Huffington Post