The latest of the liberal-leaning Clarify podcasts on Spotify addressed the issue of police killings, attributing the problem to a “pattern of racial discrimination.”
The third episode of the podcast released Sept. 27 was called “Civil Rights.” In it, host Baratunde Thurston, a former producer of The Daily Show, discussed the “lack of accountability” in policing while neglecting to include any sort of pro-law enforcement voice.
Thurston’s musical guest was Chicago rapper Vic Mensa. Mensa, who said his mentors are Malcolm X and Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton, argued that “this country was built upon the backs of slaves” and that police “don’t care about [black] lives.”
Additionally, Thurston stated that police use force on black people at a rate 2.5 times higher than on other Americans. Although he did point out that 49 percent of those police killed are white while only 24 percent are black, he countered that black people make up only 13 percent of the population.
However, Thurston left out the fact that according to the government’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1980 and 2008, 52.5 percent of homicide offenders were black, and that according to The Washington Post, white police officers killing unarmed black men accounts for less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings.
Thurston introduced two more guests to discuss the racial bias within the police force: Darnell Moore, an editor at The Feminist Wire, along with Edwin Raymond from the NYPD. Having a police officer on the panel might have balanced the discussion, except that Raymond is one of twelve police officers filing a lawsuit against the NYPD for racist practices.
Each man recalled their first experiences with the police, which were all negative with the exception of Thurston’s story.
Thurston briefly asked Raymond about how much sympathy people should have for police officers and the difficult decisions they must make every day. While Raymond admitted that policing “is a tough job,” he contrasted the policing seen in movies to actual policing, saying “implicit bias” is a part of actual policing.
He also asserted that white communities receive good policing while black communities receive “back door, unwritten, de facto” policing. Not only are racist police officers to blame, but the “systemic issues in policing” that are “deeply embedded” in the force.
As usual with this “facts” only podcast, Thurston did not provide a counterpoint. He failed to mention a recent study conducted by a Harvard economist and reported by The New York Times which concluded that “officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white.”
The Clarify podcast is the product of a partnership between Spotify and Mic designed to reach millennials on election issues. It has already discussed student debt with a Bernie Sanders supporter and blamed Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for America’s income inequality.
In this particular podcast, Clarify followed in the steps of other media outlets which focus on only certain parts or one side of the story while reporting on race and police. For example, CNN removed critical audio from the footage of Keith Scott's death. CNN also cut out parts of Sherelle Smith’s call for protestors to burn down suburbs, turning it into a call for peace. On September 21, The Root proclaimed, “all cops are bad.”
