As anger and violence erupted in US cities over the weekend in outrage over the death of George Floyd, President Trump and the Justice Department focused their ire more on the protesters — with plenty of allegations about thugs and looters and the radical left — than on the core issue of the protests: police brutality.
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, whose city is one of many to be hit with demonstrations, said Sunday that Trump’s comments were “making it worse.”
“We are beyond a tipping point in this country. And his rhetoric only inflames that. And he should just sometimes stop talking," she said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
The federal response has been met with condemnation and rebuke from criminal justice groups and civil rights leaders, Democratic lawmakers, and some law enforcement officials, who called the protests the culmination of a decades-long cycle of racism and police brutality against Black people and years of failed reforms under Republican and Democratic presidents.
But they said perhaps no other administration in modern US history has done more to curtail investigations and efforts meant to curb corrupt police practices, militarize law enforcement agencies, and stoke racial tensions than the Trump administration.
“We don’t need condolences, we need justice,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund. “And right now, you have a Department of Justice who believes in everything but justice."
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