Soledad O'Brien spoke with Bob Schieffer on CBS' Face the Nation Sunday about her new documentary film, Black in America: Black and Blue, in which she found there to be "aggressive targeting of black people" by police officers.
O'Brien's film focuses on the New York City Police Department and the Eric Garner case. But as she assured Schieffer, "It's interesting, even though the killing of Eric Garner opens our documentary, I think anybody who thinks that what is happening right now is only about Eric Garner, or is only about Michael Brown, is really missing what is happening in black America."
"There is this aggressive targeting of black people that doesn't happen in white communities," O'Brien adds.
Schieffer asked if her statement was a "valid feeling." To offer proof, O'Brien called upon the numbers used in the documentary and provided by the NYPD for stop-and-frisks between 2002 and 2012:
There were five million stops. 83% of those stops were blacks and Latinos. 90% of those people who were stopped, 90%, that did not move on to an arrest, it did not move on even to a summons. Those people had done nothing. So, 90% of the blacks and Latinos that were stopped in stop-and-frisk in New York City, didn't do anything. Imagine what that does psychically to a culture if you "fit the description," which means you're black, male 19-25.
When asked if most of those stops were done in high-crime areas, O'Brien said, "Absolutely."
Following up with the obvious, Schieffer asked, "You wouldn't see that as justification that you might operate differently in areas where there are lots of crimes than areas where there are relatively no crimes?"
"I think the challenge is that it's not being applied proportionally," O'Brien answered.
She explains that when police stop people even when they haven't done anything, they create a criminalized culture in these minority communities.
One young black man interviewed in the documentary said he has been stopped at least 100 times by police. O'Brien said, "At some point, I think, it becomes very damaging to these individuals, but also to a community that understands, this is unfair."
O'Brien concluded spelling out the most important thing that needs to be done to improve relations between police and black America:
Understanding. When we did our first "Black in America" documentary eight years ago, we talked to black families -- whether they were poor, whether they were middle-class, or they were rich. They would tell me about "the conversation" which is, the conversation they had with their 11- or 12-year-old son how to deal with the police. And white people would say to me, 'Well, I tell my children they should be respectful to police.' And black people would say, 'I teach my son how to survive an interaction with the police.'
Regardless of socioeconomic status, that is problematic. And that, I think, is at the core of all of these marches and anger that we've seen.
