James Comey gave a speech on Race and Law Enforcement
James Comey gave a speech on Race and Law Enforcement
Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, James Comey, gave a speech on Race and Law Enforcement
In 2015, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, James Comey, gave a speech on Race and Law Enforcement. In that speech, Comey said this:
One reason we cannot forget our law enforcement legacy is that the people we serve and protect cannot forget it, either. So, we must talk about our history. It is a hard truth that lives on https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jamescomeygeorgetownraceandlaw.htm
What does Comey mean by this statement?
Your submission must be at least two pages and be a critical thinking assessment of Comey’s statement. Remember critical thinking requires an objective analysis and, evaluation of the issues and, concludes.
Brief of the speech
Thank you, President DeGioia. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for inviting me to Georgetown University. I am honored to be here. I wanted to meet with you today, as President DeGioia said, to share with you my thoughts on the relationship between law enforcement and the communities we serve and protect. Like a lot of things in life, that relationship is complicated. Relationships often are.
Beautiful Healy Hall — part of, and all around where we sit now — was named after this great university’s 29th President, Patrick Francis Healy. Healy was born into slavery in Georgia in 1834. His father was an Irish immigrant plantation owner; his mother, a slave. Under the laws of that time, Healy and his siblings were considered to be slaves. Healy is believed to be the first African-American to earn a Ph.D., the first to enter the Jesuit order, the first to be president of Georgetown University or any predominantly white university.
Given Georgetown’s remarkable history, and that of President Healy, this struck me as the appropriate place to talk about the difficult relationship between law enforcement and the communities we are sworn to serve and protect.
With the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, and the ongoing protests throughout the country, and the assassinations of NYPD Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, we are at a crossroads. As a society, we can choose to live our lives everyday, raising our families, going to work, and hoping that someone, somewhere, will do something to ease the tension — to smooth over the conflict.
We can roll up our car windows, turn up the radio and drive around these problems, or we can choose instead to have an open and honest discussion about what our relationship is today — what it should be, what it could be, what it needs to be — if we took more time to better understand one another.
Unfortunately, in places like Ferguson and New York City, and in some communities across this nation, there is a disconnect between police agencies and the citizens they server — predominantly in communities of color.
Serious debates are taking place about how law enforcement personnel relate to the communities they serve, about the appropriate use of force, and about the real and perceived biases, both within and outside of law enforcement. These are important debates. Every American should feel free to express an informed opinion, to protest peacefully, to convey frustration and even anger in a constructive way.
That’s what makes this democracy great. Those conversations — as bumpy and uncomfortable as they can be — help us understand different perspectives, and better serve our communities. Of course, they are only conversations in the true sense of that word if we are willing not only to talk but to listen, too.
I worry that this incredibly important and difficult conversation about race and policing has become focused entirely on the nature and character of law enforcement officers, when it should also be about something much harder to discuss. Debating the nature of policing is very important, but I worry that it has become an excuse, at times, to avoid doing something harder.
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