When we talk about making the United States
the kind of nation we want to become, we all understand that, tragically, racism remains alive today,
and our goal together must be to end all forms of institutional racism and make major reforms in our criminal justice system.
When I talk about racism, I am not just talking
about the incredible sickness of a man who walked into a Bible study class in Charleston,
prayed with people in the room, and then took out a gun and killed nine of them in cold blood.
And I'm not just talking about the hundreds of groups in this country -- hate groups --
whose sole reason for existence -- if you can believe it, and it's hard to imagine --
groups whose sole reason for existence is based on hatred.
Hatred of African-Americans, hatred of immigrants, hatred of gays, hatred of Jews, hatred of Catholics --
imagine an organization whose sole reason in life is not to love their fellow brothers and sisters
but to hate those people who are different than them.
But I'm not even talking about those groups.
I am talking about Sandra Bland, and Michael Brown, and Rekia Boyd,
and Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and many others --
and too many others who died at the hands of police officers or in police custody.
Now, I was -- two points to be made here.
First, if anybody thinks that this phenomenon of people being killed while in --
unarmed people being killed while in police custody -- is something new, you are very, very mistaken.
It has gone on for a very long time, but the only difference is that way back when, we didn't have these things.
Now you're seeing it on TV.
And let me also say I speak as a former mayor of the city of Burlington, Vermont,
and spent a lot of time working with our police department.
In my view, the vast majority of police officers in this country are honest,
they are hardworking, and they are trying to do a very difficult job.
Many of them are underpaid, many of them are undertrained,
and many of them work under incredible schedules that make their lives very difficult.
But let me also say this: That like any other public official,
if a police officer breaks the law, that police officer must be held accountable.
Now, when you have, as we do, more people in jail than any other country on earth,
doesn't take a genius to figure out that our criminal justice system is deeply broken.
So I can't go into all of what I believe we have to do,
but let me touch on some of the reforms that we need.
First, I do not want to see local police departments heavily militarized
and look like they're invading armies.
A good police department -- and there are many of them -- are part of the community,
which is why I believe in the concept of community policing:
Police officers in the community, part of the community, trusted by people in the community.
Furthermore, we need police departments in this country who look like the people they are serving.
We need new rules regarding the allowable use of force and lethal force.
A good police officer -- and I have personally seen this more than once --
walks into a volatile situation, people are fighting, people are screaming,
and a good police officer knows how to defuse that situation without using force.
We need to rethink the war on drugs.
I find it remarkable that many young people have a criminal record for smoking marijuana
but not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for illegal behavior.
We need to end the absurdity of private corporations making profits by running and building prisons.
And we just introduced legislation to do just that.
Companies should not be profiting from the incarceration of fellow Americans.
We need the take a hard look at minimum sentencing procedures.
Too many nonviolent folks have ended up in jail with their lives destroyed.
We need to invest in drug courts and medical and mental health intervention.
Substance abuse is a disease, not a crime, and we've got to treat it as a disease.
And I'll tell you something else:
We need to absolutely rethink how we treat people in prison
so that there is a path for them out of prison back into society.
Now you tell me. You tell me.
Some guy serves two, five years in jail,
comes out of jail with no education, with no job, with no money, with no housing --
are we really shocked that he goes back into the old environment that got him into jail in the first place?
We're not shocked, and that's why we have a horrendously high rate of recidivism --
people who come in jail, get out, and they go back into jail.
And we got to focus on that issue.
