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This is your brain on Fox News.
It’s the only possible explanation for Attorney General Bill Barr’s appallingly tone deaf testimony before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday. Only someone who’s been cosseted in the safespace of rightwing media for years would go on national television and justify police violence by pointing to black-on-black crime. Even Breitbart got rid of that hashtag for being too overtly racist. And yet, our distinguished AG trotted it out yesterday in his opening statement.
The threat to black lives posed by crime on the streets is massively greater than any threat posed by police misconduct. The leading cause of death for young black males is homicide. Every year approximately 7,500 black Americans are victims of homicide, and the vast majority of them – around 90 percent – are killed by other blacks, mainly by gunfire.
Barr then “disproved” systemic racism in law enforcement by pointing out that cops kill white people, too. Check and mate!
Although the death of George Floyd – an unarmed black man – at the hands of the police was a shocking event, the fact is that such events are fortunately quite rare. According to statistics compiled by the Washington Post, the number of unarmed black men killed by police so far this year is 8. The number of unarmed white men killed by police over the same time period is 11. Some unarmed suspects, moreover, were physically attacking officers or threatening others at the time they were shot.
Never mind the fact that America’s population is 13 percent African American, but 42 percent of people killed by police are Black. Black people are three times more likely to be killed by cops than white people, but the Attorney General didn’t come here to talk about math. He came here to blame the protestors for crime in America.
Hewing closely to the Murdoch ecosphere’s carefully curated version of reality, Barr insisted that the protests in America’s streets have nothing to do with racial justice — “violent rioters and anarchists have hijacked legitimate protests to wreak senseless havoc and destruction on innocent victims” — and claimed that criticizing police actually causes a spike in crime, saying, “When a community turns on and pillories its own police, officers naturally become more risk averse and crime rates soar.”
The highest law enforcement officer in the land is explicitly excusing police officers who refuse to do their jobs in response to citizens who exercise their First Amendment right to criticize the government. And all that was just in his opening statement.
As noted by former House counsel Norm Eisen, Barr was noticeably ruder when questioned by non-white members of the Committee, particularly women.
He deliberately tried to talk over Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who pointed out that the Justice Department dispatched stormtroopers to Portland to deal with graffiti, but was apparently unbothered by armed men waving Confederate flags invading the Michigan statehouse.
Barr was incensed when Rep. Jackson Lee questioned him about the Justice Department’s refusal to initiate pattern and practice investigations of police departments who have demonstrably higher rates of violence against non-white citizens than whites.
And he became visibly hostile when Rep. Karen Bass confronted him with the real, human cost of the “zero tolerance” policies Barr endorses.
It was a shameful performance by a walking dinosaur who started the hearing by congratulating himself for coming out of retirement to “get to the bottom of the grave abuses involved in the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal” and went on to spout racist tropes from the 1980s about criminal gangs and “drug pushers” and defended the propriety of using teargas on non-violent protestors because sometimes the government has to “disperse an unlawful assembly, and sometimes, unfortunately, peaceful protesters are affected by that.”
Luckily, Bill Barr won’t have to hear any of the criticism, though. Back in his Fox cocoon, the reviews were great! And that’s all that matters.
Written Statement of William P. Barr Attorney General [Testimony to House Judiciary Committee, July 28, 2020]
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.