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Police culture in US out of control: Author

Friday, 19 August 2016 10:19 AM [ Last Update: Friday, 19 August 2016 10:20 AM ]

Police officers surround a police vehicle as they watch demonstrators protesting the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Illinois on December 18, 2015. (Photo by AFP)

Press TV has conducted an interview with Paul Street, author, journalist and political commentator from Iowa, about a decision to fire seven officers accused of making false reports on a deadly police shooting of a black teenager in Chicago after nearly two years.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: The irony here is that only after a year and after the media got wind of the video of McDonald’s death and had a judge make it public, was the scandal revealed and many say a cover-up of this magnitude goes all the way up the ladder. So, before complementing the police chief on what he's doing by perhaps firing these seven officers, one may want to consider that he was kind of backed into this decision.

Street: Oh, I think that video images left him no choice. They were very embarrassing. I’ve reviewed a lot of the film footage. And even after the Laquan McDonald case, even after the nationwide scandal and drama which just continues on and on with a young black man generally being killed about every other day or so by generally white police officers in the United States, the film footage just showed a bunch of poorly trained sort of jacked-up out of control police just flooding into this black middle-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago and behaving in the most unprofessional possible nature including shooting guns at a moving vehicle, firing off rounds bullet after bullet into a residential neighborhood and then climbing over people's fences and yelling and screaming at everybody and shooting wildly and I feel they had no choice but act in the wake of that film footage.

Press TV : And Mr. Street, when people see these many officers willing to conspire to kill a young man of color in cold blood and try to cover it up, it proves the allegation that there is a serious problem in US police culture that's either built on some kind of gangland mentality or based on racism, your thoughts.

Street: Well, it's a bit of both and there's this very well-known phenomenon in the police community called the Blue Code. And it is very gang like. It seems you are ostracized and you will not pursue your career any further if you are perceived as having helped the authorities “rat out” an offending officer. And it's part of why the police culture itself is the problem. And this culture just seems to be out of control all over the country right now in the United States.

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