In the last week alone, protests have erupted over the deaths of 13-year-old Adam Toledo and 20-year-old Daunte Wright—two young people who died at the hands of police over the last month.
As conversations of police reform, accountability, and abolition have once again become widespread, CNN’s Chris Cuomo said that U.S. policing methods will only be reformed if officers were to kill the children of white people. “How many more?” Cuomo said. “Die of the pandemic, dying from police shootings. George Floyd, Daunte Wright. I wonder if you’ll remember their names six months from now because they’ll be replaced by so many others.”
He slammed delays in police reforms and ridiculed those who put the fault of the shootings on the victims. “Why do that? Because you wanna make the problem them. Takes the onus off the idea that you’re wrong about policing needing to change.” He continued, “Forget that police are trained to deal with non-compliance with force that is not lethal. Hey, comply or die.”
He implied that if white people’s kids start getting killed, then that would lead to gun law reform and better gun control. “And you know what the answer is. You really do. You don’t like it, I don’t like it, it scares me,” he said. “Shootings, gun laws, access to weapons. Oh, I know when they’ll change. Your kids start getting killed, white people’s kids start getting killed.”
“What is going on with these police? Maybe we shouldn’t even have police,” he said in a sarcastic voice. “That kind of mania, that kind of madness, that’ll be you. That’ll be the majority because it’s your people.”
Cuomo added that unity is what we need for police reform. “Us and them, us and them. There’s never a solution that doesn’t begin with we. We, the people.”
