Deray McKesson Talks Criminal Justice [Video]

By YouTube Originals
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In partnership with YouTube Originals #BearWitnessTakeAction 2: Continuing The Movement.
DeRay McKesson tackles the criminal justice system and focuses on three distinct ways in which to improve it – from police violence, to the felony theft threshold, to no-knock raids.
Weve marched. Weve cried out for justice. Weve raised our voices. Whats next? Join Common & Keke Palmer for #BearWitnessTakeAction 2: Continuing The Movement on December 5th. Its time to raise the heat.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
I’m DeRay McKesson, civil rights activist,
and one of the cofounders of Campaign Zero.
I’m here to talk about three big ideas in criminal justice.
The first is police violence.
As of today, there are only 16 days
where a police officer did not kill someone in the United States.
The police kill 1,100 people a year,
disproportionately killing people of color.
Black people are three times more likely to be killed
by police than white people.
Members of the Latino community are two times more likely
to be killed by the police.
There are eight cities in the United States
where a black man is more likely to be killed by a police officer
than anyone is likely to be killed by anyone else.
11 officers have ever been convicted in one year for those killings,
and those officers aren’t even convicted for murder.
Imagine if you had a job where it was impossible to be fired.
It doesn’t matter how many cameras you put up
if they know it is impossible for there to be any accountability.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what a felony is.
And one of the biggest ones for me has always been felony theft.
In the public imagination, when people hear “felony,”
they often hear “murder.” That is like a proxy for people.
And I think, you know, I blame much of the storytelling
that happens in Hollywood for that.
Here’s the rub. In New Jersey today,
theft over $200 is a felony.
In Kentucky, Illinois, and New Mexico,
the threshold is $500 for felony theft.
In New York today, theft over $1,000 is a felony.
Then imagine getting a decade long sentence
There’s no world where that makes sense.
Most people know about no-knock raids
because of the killing of Breonna Taylor.
The Louisville Police Department killed Breonna Taylor
based on faulty information, shoddy policing,
and just a callousness towards people’s lives.
About 60,000 no-knock raids happen in a given year.
There’s research that shows that judges spend about three minutes
approving these warrants to just go into people’s homes and to search their property.
But what’s interesting is about 90% of them are assigned for drugs.
And this is much closer to people than they think.
There’s a case in Missouri where the police executed a search warrant,
a no-knock warrant for an unpaid utility bill.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t even know
you could get a search warrant for a unpaid utility bill.
That’s wild. And here’s really the thing.
The police will say that this is our tool to, like,
get drugs off the street, da-da-da.
The police actually don’t do raids of drug kingpins,
and you might be like, “Why wouldn’t the police do a no-knock raid
of, like, a drug kingpin’s house?”
They don’t do it ’cause they don’t think it’s safe.
They’re arresting drug kingpins at the corner store,
at church, at the parking lot.
So the police will tell you that they’re trying to do it
to take out these big quantities. They know that’s a lie.
There are 35 cities and states that are working to ban no-knock raids today.
About 59% of American voters say that we should just end no-knock raids.
And there is bipartisan support.
We gotta let this tactic go. It’ll save people’s lives.
We’ll be able to move that money to something else
that actually helps people out instead of harms them.
And we know that the war on drugs is racist.
And we should dismantle it every step of the way.
We have a chance to make sure
that we put an end to this practice once and for all.
Freedom is not only the absence of oppression,
but the presence of justice and joy.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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—Photo credit: Screenshot from videoread more