“Law enforcement must acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty,” FBI director James Comey said during a speech given at Georgetown University Thursday morning Feb. 12.
“At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.”
It was the first time Comey made public remarks on the issue of policing and race relations in the country, a subject of national debate after unarmed black men who died at the hands of white police officers last year in in Ferguson, Mo. and Staten Island, New York City.
Police Bias
Comey gave a forthright assessment of the problems driving tensions between police and the communities they serve, one that top law enforcement officers rarely address—including that police, like everyone in our majority-white society, possess racial bias against blacks.
He said that many police officers, when patrolling neighborhoods where most street crime is committed by young men of color, develop “lazy mental shortcuts” assuming all black men are potential criminal suspects.
“The two young black men on one side of the street look like so many others the officer has locked up. Two young white men on the other side of the street—even in the same clothes—do not. The officer does not make the same sinister association about the two white guys, whether that officer is white or black,” Comey said at the event hosted by Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy in Washington, D.C.
