CNN’s Soledad O’Brien sat down with CBS’s Bob Schieffer to set the record straight on what the protests are really about.
“Anybody who thinks that what is happening right now [with the protests across the country] is only about Eric Garner, is only about Michael Brown is really missing what is happening in black America,” she said. “African-Americans feel that they are treated differently in the criminal justice system, they are treated differently under the law…. There is this aggressive targeting of black people. That doesn’t happen in white communities, and it’s that anger over so many years that is really percolating up now.”
When Schieffer asked if such feelings were “valid,” O’Brien pulled out the statistics, noting that 90 percent of the 5 million stop-and-frisks in New York City never result in arrests, suggesting that the stop-and-frisks are based more on people who “fit the description” than on criminal behavior.
In response to Schieffer’s suggestion that the statistics may be skewed because African-Americans are more likely to live in “high-crime areas,” O’Brien said, “I think the challenge is that it’s not being applied proportionally. For example, if you are arresting and stopping people where many of them haven’t done anything, you create a culture in that community — even a high-crime community — where people feel like they are being criminalized, even those — as we saw in our documentary — who haven’t done anything.”
Most tellingly, O’Brien described interactions with police as an issue of survival for African-Americans:
White people would say to me, ‘Well, I tell my children they should be respectful of police.’ And black people would say, ‘I teach my son how to survive an interaction with the police,’ regardless of socio-economic status…. That is problematic, and that, I think, is at the core of all these marches and anger that we’ve seen.