December 7, 2014

This really needs to happen but with the incoming congress, I wouldn't hold my breath:

In an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton outlined the steps his department is taking in the wake of Eric Garner's death following an apparent chokehold by an NYPD officer, including full retraining of 22,000 officers who work in the field and implementing new smartphone technology for all officers.

"There's probably no department in America right now that's doing more on these issues," Bratton said.

But NAACP Cornell William Brooks, in a separate "Face the Nation" interview, said the department is not doing enough.

"If we're looking at the tragedy of Eric Garner as a single incident it's not enough. To talk about training retrospectively, training prospectively as opposed to holding people accountable retrospectively, that's where we have to go. We have to look at yes, body cameras. We have to look at training, we have to look at fundamentally changing the culture of policing in New York City and across he country," Brooks said.

"We have a model of policing that is predicated on essentially operating in the community and not being of the community and that is fundamentally a problem. And so this is part of a longer narrative. We simply can't treat these as individual incidents to be assessed in that way without larger reform," Brooks said.

The larger reforms he proposed include federal legislation to ban racial profiling, a national standard for use of force, and more examination and implementation of a body camera policy.

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