"This is a dangerous time for our country" as U.S. faces three crises, Dallas Bishop T.D. Jakes says
Dallas Bishop T.D. Jakes, who leads The Potter's House church, said America is facing a "dangerous time" as it grapples with three crises simultaneously. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, economic fallout and unrest over police brutality, Jakes urged people to be "vigilant."
"This is a dangerous time for our country because of the convergence of those three different issues coalescing at the same time," he said on "CBS This Morning" Wednesday. "It's a very dangerous time because we have enemies, and we have external enemies that seek to exploit these opportunities, and we have to be all the more vigilant to be watchful because we're quite vulnerable right now."
Jakes said there is "unrest in every area of our government, in every area of our being."
"We do not have the solidarity that we need to be the country that is able to defend itself and defend our allies because we are distracted by internal corruption," he said.
The pastor said the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of a white police officer was the "tip of the iceberg." After video surfaced of the white officer pressing his knee into Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes while he was handcuffed and pleading for air, the officer was fired and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter. Two autopsies later said Floyd's death was a homicide, but one said he died from asphyxiation and the other said he died from a heart attack.
"Had it not been for the click of a camera, we would never even know what happened," he said. "The records were falsified, there was all types of corruption in the process, there's a discrepancy in the autopsies. It just shows that there is a system that condones and supports and there is a fraternity in this debauchery that has to be dealt with and has to be cleaned up from the root up."
Jakes credited the protests that have erupted across the country following Floyd's death for capturing the attention of the world, but said there needs to be policy change as well.
"You can only protest so long," he said. "If that protesting doesn't turn into policy at the end of the day, we will go back to normalcy, and we've seen this too many times before."
He said the three other officers at the scene of Floyd's death need to be arrested and there needs to be "substantive change" in police departments all over the United States.
"We need to set up a council to develop a policy that is comprehensive throughout all police departments, and we need to regulate it and deny financial aid to police departments that do not live up to those regulations," he said.
Until there is change, communities won't be able to heal, Jakes said.
"There's no way we can have healing. It's like opening up somebody in the middle of a surgery and say, you know, let's heal while they're still bleeding," he said. "I think that our rush to get back to normalcy has caused us to over and over again be unproductive in bringing about long-term systemic changes that are actionable, that are satisfying and that causes America to live up to its creed and its highest ideals."