Lee Merritt is a civil rights attorney representing the families of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery Interview: The Police Force is Militarized and Racist

Lee Merritt is a civil rights attorney representing the families of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. He is running for Attorney General of Texas with an agenda of changing police culture. Lee Merritt

Q: The Washington Post has tracked fatal shootings committed by police officers for the past five years, and has found the rate to consistently hover around 1,000 per year. They noted, “The quantity of rare events in huge populations tends to remain stable absent major societal changes, such as a fundamental shift in police culture.” What sort of shifts in police culture do you think would help address the rate of fatal shootings? 

A: American police forces represent the deadliest police culture in the industrialized world. No nation kills and incarcerates more of its citizens per capita than the United States. This is a result of a militarized and racist police culture that has its inception in  America’s unique chattle slave trade. American policing entities came into being during a brutal period of slavery in American history where the African American population was considered property. A primary function of police units was to serve as slave catchers and overseers as America experienced unprecedented growth and an economic boom owing largely to the free labor provided by the system of chattel slavery. With racism, violence and human trafficking at the core of American policing, no wonder America boast a prison industrial complex unparalelled in human history and disproportionately black. Changing police culture in the US will require difficult work in dismantling decades of policies intended to further white supremacist thinking and ideology. We have been trickling out criminal justice reform policies, whereas we really need a flood of them and a complete overhaul of our systems. We need to take on the human rights abuses perpetrated by police as a national priority, requiring a real reconciliation process. Such an endeavor would require a cultural shift similar to the transition which occurred in South Africa during the fall of Apartheid.

Source Article:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/morgansimon/2021/04/16/the-money-story-behind-police-power-civil-rights-attorney-lee-merritt-explains/