FBI director: US at crossroads on race relations, policing

WASHINGTON – The United States is at a crossroads on matters of race relations and law enforcement, presenting “hard truths” that the public and police must confront, FBI Director James Comey said Thursday.

He stepped squarely into the national discussion about police conduct and officers’ interactions with minority communities, explaining that he “felt like we haven’t had a healthy dialogue, and I don’t want to see these important issues drift away.”

Answering questions after a speech at Georgetown University, he noted there was “a tendency to move onto other things as busy people. But these issues, especially about race and law enforcement, have always been with us, and we can’t let it drift away and then talk about it another day.”

The deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York, both African-American, at the hands of white police officers, as well as the more recent slayings of two New York police officers, have raised difficult issues on both sides of the debate, Comey said.

One is that police officers who work in neighborhoods where most street crime is committed by young black men may hold unconscious biases and be tempted to take what he called “lazy mental shortcuts” in dealing with suspicious situations.

That means officers may be influenced by feelings of “cynicism,” relying on assumptions they should not make and complicating the “relationship between police and the communities they serve,” he said.

But another truth, he said, is minorities in poor neighborhoods too often inherit a “legacy of crime and prison,” a cycle he said must be broken to improve race relations with police.