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Hillary Clinton on Wednesday called for America to come to terms with “hard truths” about race and justice, and spoke emotionally about the destruction in Baltimore following the death of a 25-year-old black man.
“Yet again, the streets of an American city are marred by violence, by shattered glass,” Clinton said during a speech at Columbia University. “What we have seen in Baltimore should indeed, I think indeed does, tear at our soul.”
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She also called for a broad rethink of the U.S. criminal justice system and an end to mass incarceration.
“There is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison in their lifetimes, and an estimated 1.5 million black men are ‘missing’ from their families and communities because of incarceration and premature death,” Clinton said.
Baltimore is cleaning up after rioting and looting swept through its streets Monday night following the funeral of Freddie Gray, who died last week after apparent sustaining severe injuries while in police custody.
President Barack Obama called on Tuesday for America to do some soul searching about policing and the plight of impoverished communities.
Clinton, the Democratic front-runner in the 2016 presidential campaign, on Wednesday also cast the events in Baltimore and a series of other fatal confrontations with police as a wake-up call.
Clinton said that “not only as a mother as a grandmother but as a citizen, a human being, my heart breaks for these young men and their families. We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.”
She also struck a populist tone, saying society should judge its success by measuring how many families can get ahead and stay ahead. She said that metric “is a far better measurement than the size of bonuses handed out in downtown office buildings.”
Unlike the roundtables she has participated in on the campaign trail in recent weeks, where she has done more listening than laying out concrete policy proposals, Clinton said she supports every police department across the country having body cameras to keep officers accountable for their actions.
“This is a common sense step,” said said, adding the country should go further than what President Obama has done and make cameras “the norm everywhere.”
She called for an end to the “era of mass incarceration,” citing the figure that one out of every 20 American children had a parent in prison in 2013. “The consequences are profound…It’s time to change our approach,” she said.
She said that includes increased support for mental health and drug treatment.
“The promise of deinstitutionalizing those in mental health facilities was supposed to be followed by the creation of community-based treatment centers,” she said, noting that only half of the equation was completed. “Our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions.”
When it comes to reducing the country’s prison population while keeping communities safe, Clinton admitted, “I don’t know the answers.” But she said she would be studying and addressing the issue further in the coming months and vowed to act on “the broader inequalities in our society.”
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