'Training Is Not Enough': Senator Cory Booker Demands Accountability From Police

The coronavirus pandemic has lose light on a few compounding racial inequities that existed far before the outbreak dominated our social eats and paused life as we knew it. There really are higher COVID-19 mortality rates among Black Americans than white citizens, as an example, caused in part by discriminatory housing policies and environmental racism; inequities in the labor force, and disparities in access to health care. In the organization sector, minority-owned firms are more likely to be denied access to emergency loan programs than those run by white agency company founders. And as more cases emerge of officers selectively enforcing CDC tips requiring masks in public, lawmakers are turning their attention toward racial bases in policing.


Senator Cory Booker is among an audience of legislators that sent a letter to the Department of Justice and FBI urging the corporations to “immediately offer training and guidance on bias, policing, and disproportionate or selective enforcement while in the COVID-19 pandemic.” In it, they cite countless instances of alleged discrimination. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation system revoked its policy requiring masks for transit riders soon after four officers forcibly dragged a Black man from a bus for allegedly not wearing a mask. And in Miami, volunteer Dr. Armen Henderson was getting prepared to supply resources to the homeless and test weak populations for COVID-19 any time whenever he was arrested and detained outdoors his residence. Henderson believes he was racially profiled.


While lawmakers are asking firms for extra guidance on racial bias in light of the pandemic, such training has already been implemented in countless jurisdictions across the nation. Case in point, the Miami Police Department, which is investigating the police misconduct complaint filed by Henderson, has been under federal oversight since 2016 following a pattern and practice of excessive use of force. So, it begs the question: Is police bias training actually effective?


Senator Bookers believes it could be once coupled with accountability. Throughout a recent Zoom interview, the senator discussed with MTV News about policies he’s championing to mitigate police misconduct, how holding officers accountable includes considering their mental wellness, and why he still believes in America’s track record of righting itself once its darkest moments bring the country’s flaws to light.


MTV News: What instigated you, Kamala Harris, and the rest of your colleagues to send this letter off to Attorney General Barr and Chris Wray?


Cory Booker: I'm on the Judiciary Committee. I discussed to them both very long about implicit racial bias in policing and why we still have widely disproportionate levels of use of force in our nation by police officers on African Residents of the United States. And this is deadly. You know, the variety of police shootings in our nation are still unconscionably high. Once Obama did his 21st Century Task Force, police leaders were talking about the issue of implicit racial bias. We know that for people who have implicit racial bias training, you actually can decrease those challenges of improper use of force which are such a reality for young Black men.


This administration hasn't done that. They've stopped their accountability for police forces like Obama was doing for cities all across America, including Newark. And right now you have all these stories that I've began hearing about young Black boys wearing masks as they're being instructed to do, then having that becoming a trigger for even more police action. So this is a problem that exists and may even grow after awhile, and we should be doing nationwide implicit racial bias training, period. However we should especially be doing it right now with the challenges that are coming up as a result of mask-wearing.


MTV News: Growing up, what have your personalized experiences been like with police?


Booker: I wrote a column Whenever I was a college student following the Rodney King verdict, any time there was rioting going on. The title of it is, "Why Have I Lost Control?" It's about my experiences with police as a young Black man and how I'm not shocked that they noticed those officers justified in the beating they gave Rodney King. And thus how do you even start to address it?


So right now you fast-forward from that young African American man. Right now I'm in my thirties and I'm the mayor of a city — Black mayor, Black city — and I knew it was a problem. I discussed to the provide, I thought I was doing correct thing. And then the Obama administration comes in, pulls all of the information in a sophisticated way that we don't have the resources to do, and mentioned, “No, you're still disproportionately stopping African Americans.” So even having the correct intentions isn't insufficient. So, first, we're not even admitting it is a problem to get to the national intention to do something about it, and then we haven't created the systems of accountability where you or I know the intelligence on police-involved shootings.


MTV News: Does implicit bias training work? Because I'm from the South Side of Chicago. I covered the Laquan McDonald shooting, the 17-year-old who was gunned down by Jason Van Dyke, and in Chicago, it was the initial time in five decades that a officer had been incarcerated for something like that. I don't know that I'm 100 percent sold on the idea that we can train people out of implicit bias.


Booker: Training isn't insufficient. It is needed, although it isn't sufficient. And by the way, you and I have implicit biases. We have gender biases. Black police officers have implicit biases. So [it’s incorrect] to think that any one of us can escape our implicit biases. So the correct training works, nevertheless that isn't insufficient. You must have systems to measure whether that is still happening in police departments. How several helps stop did you make in a certain month period? How several of those were African American? How several of those were white? There really are ways to use big information to actually visualize if the training has changed the behavior.


Do you remember that Texas pool party where that little Black girl was sat on by that policeman? I remember it stung me so much, I remember it. Well, any time Obama did this with his 21st Century Policing Task Force, what they noticed were predictive analytics. That's a magnificent term that insinuates looking at intelligence you could predict people's behavior. And so they noticed out they could predict situations in which police misconduct would happen. As an example, one of the indicators they noticed is police officers who repeat a certain kind of stressful situation are more likely to lash out and have a misconduct claim. And one of these particular types of stressful situations is suicide calls. A intelligence specialist from the Obama administration used that incident, that pool party, [to illustrate that] if an officer has had a suicide call, they are much more likely to have an officer misconduct file charged against them. That officer who sat on that little girl had two suicide calls in the month before. Training isn't insufficient. We have to begin having systems of accountability and transparency into what's going on both for the officer's sake and for the community's sake.


MTV News: I love that you made therapy or addressing the mental health of those officers a piece of that accountability piece. Because it's about caring for the officers and being empathetic to the work that they have to do however also holding them responsible for their mental wellness as they carry out that work.


Booker: My greatest heroes, like [Martin Luther] King and John Lewis, they never allowed the hatred and the bigotry of these offending them strip them of their ability to still visualize their dignity. We have to demand unflinchingly police accountability. However we can never stop seeing those officers for who they are, their dignity, their fear. You should to be able to see the totality of the scenario. I plan to be unrelenting in the protection of African American communities, African American males from police brutality. We have call it out.


I am going to also be unrelenting in [calling out] the hypocrisy in our society. I was talking with a friend, seeing these guys protesting initial up their states with their AK-47s on capitol steps and I just mentioned to my friend, "If that was a bunch of black guys on there with their COVID-19 masks holding AK-47s, there could be a whole different kind of [response]."  I'll never flinch from calling out those issues, however we cannot stop seeing the human dignity of each person involved in this tortured present that we're in 'cause we're never gonna get to a solution unless we get to it together.


MTV News: segment of the reason we have the gun laws we have now is that the Black Panthers were those Black boys with those guns in the ’60s.


Booker: You're right. I hope people take time to read that history about how the Black Panthers openly carrying guns forced a lot of folks to change their gun laws because they didn't want Black folks showing up at city hall meetings with guns.


MTV News: do you know that, once this pandemic is over, we’ll visualize a change in the way legislators move forward? Has it personally affected the way you'll govern? 


Booker: Look, once ladies threw themselves out windows at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, dying on the pavement, it shocked the consciousness of this nation and we changed federal working laws. Any time four ladies died at a bombing in Birmingham, it shocked the consciousness of this nation. We expanded our moral imagination. We expanded our circles of empathy to include African Residents of the
U.S., Also it led to the changing of civil rights legislation. The question is, is this is going to be a period in American history any time we are forced to confront the disparities in health outcomes in this nation? It's not new to me. Black kids have asthma at dramatically higher rates. A Black kid with asthma is ten times more likely to perish of asthma complications than a white kid. We have a respiratory infection coming in, obviously it's going to ravish those communities.


I'm sitting in Newark. Why are the asthma rates here three, four times higher than suburban towns? Well, we have toxic waste sites, Superfund sites. We have the county incinerator here, all of those environmental toxins that are disproportionately in communities of color. So America's right now seeing this laid naked before their eyes as injustice. My prayer for us — and I want attempt to not just hope it happens however attempt to create it happen — is that we expand our empathy, moral imagination, also it translates into laws and policies that address this. That's a question mark; we're at a crossroads. We’ve got to be a nation on the constant march to prepare real the promise of America for everybody. So this is a crossroads in that all of us have to be activists in that cause. We cannot just hope it happens.