Here & Now

Gwen Moore on George Floyd, Structural Racism

Frederica Freyberg:

Following another week of state and nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd, U.S. Congresswoman Gwen Moore of Milwaukee is calling to build a ground-up approach to dismantle structural racism. Also, the Congressional Black Caucus of which she is a member, this week rolled out a package of legislation to address policing. U.S. Representative Gwen Moore joined us earlier this week and representative, thank you so much for being with us.

Gwen Moore:

Wonderful. Always to be with you, Frederica.

Frederica Freyberg:

We haven’t spoken to you in the wake of George Floyd’s death. After police have inflicted deadly force on other black men over so many years, including in your district in Milwaukee, why this time do you think his death spark worldwide protest?

Gwen Moore:

You know, Frederica, that question really deserves a lot of pondering and historians will tell us why, but the reality is that the entire world was an eyewitness to this lynching. And it was a strangulation, very inhumane, very reminiscent of the legacy of slavery, and even those folks who doubted that there were, that there was discrimination and that police were particularly violent to the African-American community, could no longer deny it. I think that it really made a huge difference for people to have to bear witness to such a horrific act.

Frederica Freyberg:

You say that you are proud that as lawmakers you are directing your outrage into legislative action. Specifically provisions of the “Justice in Policing Act of 2020” include banning chokeholds, tracking police misconduct, making it easier to sue police officers, and making lynching a federal crime. And yet you call this just a starting point. How so?

Gwen Moore:

Well, Frederica, I just want to point out members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been working on this legislation for years prior to the untimely and unfortunate death of George Floyd. One of those provisions, the de-escalation training, really was inspired by the death of Dontre Hamilton in my own community, where someone who was asleep on a public park bench ended up being shot 14 times by a police officer. And so that, I can remember as far back as Ernest Lacy, almost 40 years, him dying by strangulation in this town and participating in those marches as well. And this, of course, is a very inhumane way to try to subdue any prisoner, and I think these are common sense things that we think are a start because we don’t think that they are draconian measures. Now, there is a measure to look at qualified immunity and I think that will be the hardest piece to get over the finish line.

Frederica Freyberg:

In regard to that, would you favor weakening the role of police unions, for example, particularly their role of protecting and defending officers’ behavior?

Gwen Moore:

Well you know, I’m an ardent defender of unions. I think unions are very important in terms of bargaining for wages and benefits. But I think it’s outside of the scope of a union to be able to negotiate lack of accountability, to be able to negotiate those kinds of things away. I think that has gone– that’s a bridge too far. And so yes, I support union rights at large, but I do think that the lack of accountability, the lack of trust, we’re never going to be able to build good police community relations, community-oriented policing unless we have some accountability. You know, the piece that I’ve put into this legislation, de-escalation, is something that everybody agrees with. But de-escalation will not work. You can’t train out of a person the propensity to kill, to, if that is, in fact, written into a contract that they are not going to be accountable. And so I think that we have to get rid of that provision in union contracting.

Frederica Freyberg:

Very, very briefly, what will it take for George Floyd’s death not to be in vain?

Gwen Moore:

It will take capturing this moment not only legislatively to deal with criminal justice reforms, but I also think that this is an opportunity to look at structural racism, period. I mean, the dearth of housing opportunities, the dearth of housing– of economic opportunities, the dearth of educational opportunities. I think that here is a moment where everyone in the United States, 60, 70% of people in the United States and globally have just had a — an a-ha moment about how racism affects black people in America and George Floyd’s death was just the end of the story. It’s not the beginning of the discrimination.

Frederica Freyberg:

Representative Gwen Moore, thanks very much for joining us.

Gwen Moore:

Thank you Frederica.