Speaking to a group at Columbia University today, 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton confronted the issue of police brutality and mass incarceration head-on.
Amidst the ongoing protests in Baltimore, Clinton, who announced her candidacy earlier this month, spoke out in support of equipping every police officer with a body camera and demanded that the “out of balance” criminal justice system stop imprisoning low-level offenders.
“We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America,” she said in her speech yesterday, citing a recent New York Times article that 1.5 million Black men are “missing” due to either incarceration or premature death.
She went on to acknowledge that not all of the problems plaguing police departments can be solved by the use of body cameras, but she said that using them is a “common-sense step.”
“The president has provided the idea of matching funds to state and local governments investing in body cameras,” Clinton said. “We should go even further and make this the norm everywhere, and we should listen to law enforcement leaders who are calling for a renewed focus on working with communities to prevent crime, rather than measuring success by just the number of arrests or convictions.”