On Tuesday's Deadline: White House, MSNBC contributor Rick Stengel claimed that there has been an "epidemic" of "excessive police violence" and "targeted racism" from the last few years during a discussion of President Donald Trump's recent comments joking about treating criminals roughly.
But it is far from clear that there has actually been an increase in police violence compared to previous years as Politifact argued in 2014 that statistics on police violence had been too incomplete to draw definitive conclusions on a direction of change.
On Tuesday's show, after the ACU's Matt Schlapp declared that Trump "wasn't advocating for police brutality," Stengel -- who used to be a Time magazine editor and later an Obama administration State Department official -- made his claims of "excessive" violence and racism:
No, but he has to represent his constituency. I mean, he, it's just -- that's too cynical, it seems to me. In fact, the problem with the whole -- his remarks is we've come through a period of a couple of years where there's an epidemic of excessive police violence. I mean, we've been reckoning with that all across the country -- excessive police violence, targeted racism, all of these things. So that's the context for all of this.
After Schlapp injected, "And a lot of cops got shot, too. Let's be honest," Stengel added:
Yeah, and -- absolutely. And a President can say, you know, "I've seen all of that, and I condemn all of that, but maybe we've gone too far in the opposite direction and we actually need to be a little more strict about this." That's the way to say it as opposed to just saying, like, "Bang some heads, and, you know, have no restraint." I mean, that's the problem. The problem is the context. He doesn't have history. He's going back to some earlier mindset. I don't, I mean, I think we're not actually in that much disagreement about it.
