Hillary Clinton Calls for Police Body Cameras

The presidential hopeful talked long and hard about police brutality all day.

Throughout the day today, Hillary Clinton has made on and off again speeches about the police brutality in Baltimore and beyond. What she is saying will be heavily analyzed in the coming days and months, especially by African Americans.

“As a citizen, a human being, my heart breaks for these young men and their families,” Clinton said, according to CNN, as she listed a number of incidents in the last year that have found black men killed at the hands of law enforcement. “We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.”

She continued: “We have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance and these recent tragedies should galvanize us to come together as a nation to find out balance against.”

He comment stands in stark contrast to the comment recently uttered by President Obama, where called the looters and rioters in Baltimore “thugs.” 

Clinton seems to have been shaken by the death of Freddie Gray and the Baltimore riots that rocked the city earlier this week, but she also appeared strong and forthright in her discussion of racial politics. She believes that reforms need to be made “on our streets, in our courthouses, in our jails and prisons, in communities too long neglected.”

But Clinton went further, saying that the problems on the streets also link to problems with unemployment and poverty. In her discussion, she also said that she felt that police should have body cameras on them at all times.

Taking it another step, she said that we also need to take a look at the people in the prison system. “Keeping them behind bars does little to reduce crimes but it does a lot to tear apart families and communities,” Clinton said of low-level offenders. “We need to start understanding how important it is to care for every single child as though that child was our own. “

Many seem to be happy with her statements, but she also earned some critics in pro-law enforcement groups.