NAACP president: Baltimore "one in a series of tragedies"
The minority community in Baltimore setting fire to cars and buildings and attacking cops is about more than just the death of a man in police custody, the NAACP president said Tuesday.
Freddie Gray's death merely let loose the frustration of the whole African-American community, and is just one "in a series of tragedies," Cornell William Brooks said Tuesday.
Brooks said on "CBS This Morning" that his organization has "to make this clear that this individual tragedy is part of a larger narrative in terms of police accountability that stretches from Staten Island to Cleveland to Ferguson - all across the length and breadth of this country."
The NAACP president said that this should draw renewed attention to the problem of police unfairly targeting minorities across the U.S.
Brooks defended Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, saying that second guessing her decision to wait to call for the National Guard, "doesn't do anything to restore these buildings or to console a grieving family or to bring about healing to a broken and bruised community. There is much to be done going forward."
At a press conference in Baltimore on Tuesday, Brooks laid out three things his organization wants to see happen: First, they want a national "end racial profiling" act, so that there is a federal means to protect citizens from police excesses; second, they want body cameras on all cops, to both protect the public and the officers themselves from unfair claims and excesses; and finally, they want to change the way police view the communities they work in to something less adversarial and more cooperative.
Above all, Brooks and other community leaders said the violence of Monday evening must not continue.
"This problem won't be solved with Molotov cocktails," Brooks said. "Burning businesses and homes and buildings in your own community is like putting a gun to your own head."