Clinton on police shootings: ‘This madness has to stop’

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called for police and criminal justice reform on Monday, one day after a gunman in Baton Rouge, La., killed three police officers and wounded three more.

“This madness has to stop,” Clinton said at the NAACP convention.

{mosads}”Watching the news from Baton Rouge yesterday, my heart broke. Not just for those officers and their grieving families, but for all of us.”

Clinton, speaking as the Republican National Convention got underway in Cleveland, said the country has “difficult, painful, essential work ahead of us to repair the bonds between our police and our communities and between and among each other.”

The presumptive Democratic nominee said there is no justification for killing a police officer.

“Killing police officers is a terrible crime. … They represent the rule of law itself,” she said.

“If you take aim at that and at them, you take aim at all of us.”

She said the country needs to invest in police training and work to rebuild trust within communities.

She also noted that many African-Americans fear the police and said there is evidence African-Americans are disproportionately killed in incidents with police.

“We cannot rest until we root [out] our implicit bias and stop the killings of African-Americans,” Clinton said, mentioning Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, two black men whose deaths earlier this month at the hands of police were caught on video and widely publicized. 

Clinton said there needs to be “end-to-end reform in our criminal justice system.” 

The next president needs to fight to hold police departments such as Ferguson, Mo., accountable and require accurate data on in-custody deaths such as Sandra Bland’s, she said — remarks that drew applause from the audience.

During the speech, Clinton pledged to start taking action on police and criminal justice reforms on her first day in office “and every day after that until we get this done.”

“This is too important. This goes to the heart of who we are,” Clinton said.

“This is about our character as Americans.”