Dear President Obama,
The national crisis of racially motivated and discriminatory policing requires your executive action.
According to FBI statistics, law enforcement kill Black Americans approximately every 3 days, and other estimates put this deadly number at almost every day. When law enforcement don’t kill, they unjustly stop, abuse, and arrest Black and brown people at wildly disproportionate and inhumane rates. Every day, families are torn apart, children are robbed of their futures, and our democracy is weakened.
We cannot afford to wait any longer for the concrete, structural reforms needed to keep our communities safe. And the unacceptable non-indictment of Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson highlights deep-seated, structural problems with the enforcement of civil rights protections that require your immediate intervention.
I strongly urge you to issue an executive order enforcing and expanding federal bans on discriminatory policing, strengthening systems of police discipline, ordering the immediate collection of nationwide data on police use of force, ending federal anti-drug grants and the Defense Department’s 1033 program, and massively re-investing in community controlled policing. Anything less is unacceptable.
There are enough federal civil rights laws on the books to hold police officers and departments fully accountable when they discriminate, injure or kill civilians. But we need your leadership to ensure that they are enforced. A number of federal policies, such as the 1033 program, are responsible for creating these intolerable conditions of abuse and police brutality and must be terminated.
Unless you take definitive action to end these destructive polices and enforce federal civil rights law, we will continue to have an unequal, deadly, broken system of justice and policing that violate human rights and cannot be trusted.
I hope you treat this matter with the utmost seriousness and do everything in your power to end the policies and practices that fuel militarized, abusive policing. Your latest initiatives are important steps in the right direction, Mr. President, but we need more. We need an executive order.
Sincerely,
Signed,
Stop the killings. Police forces are mobilizing for a war against citizens. Gangs in blue with badges, armed and dangerous, are becoming violent.
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