WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr said on Sunday that he did not believe racism was a systemic problem in policing, echoing other top administration officials’ defense of an important part of President Trump’s base as protests against police killings of unarmed black people continued across the nation. “I don’t think that the law enforcement system is systemically racist,” Mr. Barr said in an interview with the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “I think we have to recognize that for most of our history, our institutions were explicitly racist.”Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, made similar remarks on Sunday in an interview with “This Week” on ABC, saying that “systemic racism” was not an issue for law enforcement. Their defense mirrored comments made last week by the national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, and came as the protests over the killing of George Floyd last month and racial injustice in policing continued to gain momentum. Nearly a decade ago, the killings of unarmed black people — including Trayvon Martin, a teenager in Florida who was shot while walking home from the store — planted the seeds for the Black Lives Matter movement, which protests racial profiling, racial inequality in the nation’s prisons and policing issues, including excessive use of force.

Source: New York Times June 07, 2020 21:11 UTC