FBI Director James Comey waded into deep waters today on issues of race, racism, and the police. Rarely, if ever, has any FBI director made such a bold attempt to discuss and confront such issues so publicly. It's no easy speech for the top cop in the country, a middle-aged white man, to give without a few rough edges but Director Comey was sincere and earnest throughout.
According to the Washington Post, Comey said,
“Not long after riots broke out in Ferguson, I asked my staff to tell me how many people shot by police were African American. They couldn’t, and it wasn’t their fault,” he said. “Demographic data regarding officer-involved shootings is not consistently reported to us. . . . Because reporting is voluntary, our data is incomplete and therefore, in the aggregate, unreliable.”
“It’s ridiculous that I can’t tell you how many people have been shot by the police in this country,” he later said in response to a student’s question.
The
gross underreporting of police shootings and killings in America is being highlighted more and more, but to have the director of the FBI express his frustration about the problem is significant. The challenge with Comey's comments, though, came when he made a common mistake many public officials often make when attempting to make sincere comments about racism. Comey, possibly not wanting to appear as if he was just picking on whites,
felt the need to highlight his opinion that "everyone's a little bit racist." Going a step further, he seemed to almost absolve cops from any of the problems and blamed economics.
But he said police are not the root of the problem, which he said is a legacy of struggling families and lack of good education, jobs and role models that leave young people with "a legacy of crime and prison."
"Changing that legacy is a challenge so enormous and so complicated that it is, unfortunately, easier to talk only about the cops."
Again, the challenge with this perspective is this—while Comey made it clear that more documentation needs to happen with shootings by police, he basically wrapped his comments in a package stating that we're all racist and that economics are the root problem with poor policing—which just isn't the case. While poverty is a real thing in America, it is not the root of racism, discrimination, or poor policing, which impact African Americans of all socioeconomic backgrounds.