An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton on Black Lives

by Elizabeth Adetiba

Dear Hillary,

Within a matter of weeks, you were able to turn your “All Lives Matter” faux-pas into a full-on acknowledgment of the injustices Black Americans face when dealing and interacting with law enforcement.

Good on you.

You, along with your Democratic colleague Bernie Sanders, have also called for the implementation of body cameras in police departments nationwide.

Good on the both of you.

But let’s face it: you are not serious about preventing unarmed black people from being gunned down like deer by those who have sworn to protect and serve. You are simply regurgitating a narrative that, while soothing to some, deliberately fails to address your complicity in the creation of laws that paved the way for mass incarceration and unchecked police misconduct.

One such policy was the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act (commonly known as the Federal Crime Bill) passed by a Democrat-controlled Senate and signed by your husband President Bill Clinton. While that bill is often lauded on its tough approach to sex crimes and domestic abuse, this bill, among other destructive things, contributed to the creation of more prisons, expansion of the death penalty, as well as an overall culture of revenue-driven policing. Under the COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) program, the hiring process for new officers was fast-tracked in order to establish community policing — an approach to policing that should lead to employment of well-trained police officers who live in and are familiar with the community they patrol. Instead, it has led to officers from more affluent, majority-whitecommunities policing poorer black communities, as was the case with Ferguson officer Darren Wilson.

While supporters of the Federal Crime Bill often hail the bill’s support for preventative programs (such as urban recreational centers for at-risk-youth) a report by California’s Legislative Analyst Office showed that out of the $30.2 billion authorized for the bill, $27.4 billion was allocated to state and local police forces and prisons. The rest was (rather unevenly) split between federal police and preventative programs.

But I get it — it’s not right to make you guilty by association. It wasn’t you who was Commander-in-Chief back then, and if you get elected, you’ll make justice a priority for us now, right?

Not if you insist on revamping some of the same policies that were present in that 1994 bill. In 2007 you told the Urban League that you “reject a conversation about 1.4 million young men as a threat, as a headache, or as a lost cause” — the same young men that you empathized with on the “indignity” of unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policies. Yet in your tenure as a New York Senator, you insisted onrevamping the COPS program to put 100,000 more officers into communities, regardless of whether or not they are a part of them.

You fail to understand the frustration that ensued when the body cameras you advocated for did nothing to prevent the murder of Sam Dubose by Officer Ray Tensing. Your widely proclaimed confidence in Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel amidst his mishandling of the Laquan McDonald case shows voters that you are unwilling to take a tough stance on one of the most pressing issues facing the Black community today.

Look, I want to believe in you. But it is high time Democrats like yourself cut the bull; no longer will we give you the privilege of our vote while you allow black bodies to be criminalized, and ultimately dehumanized. You must understand that as the fight for the just treatment of black lives presses on, the only thing scarier than having a President who refuses to recognize the existence of bias-driven policing, is having one who only did it for show.