The NAACP president said Sunday that full-scale changes need to be made to battle what he called a “pandemic of police misconduct.”
{mosads}Cornell William Brooks, speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” said that more and more citizens want to make broad changes to police culture in the wake of the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y.
“We have to change the model of policing,” Brooks said after grand juries in both Missouri and New York declined to indict police officers involved in the Brown and Garner cases.
“So in other words where we have police fulfilling the role, or serving the role as an occupying army, as opposed to using a community policing model, that’s where we have to go.”
Brooks added that those changes needed to go beyond using body cameras on police, and a boost in training for cops. Instead, he called on lawmakers to pass federal legislation to ban racial profiling.
“The election of Barack Obama may speak to our capacity as a nation to look beyond race,” Brooks said. “It does not necessarily speak to the reality of race in this country. Racism is alive and well.”