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Boehner: Use federal money for police body cameras

by Bernie Becker - 05/03/15 9:00 AM ET

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he believed the federal government could help to finance body cameras for police officers, in an interview broadcast Sunday with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“We have got a lot of police grants that we already have on the books that can be used for this. Why not?” Boehner said of one of the leading proposals for helping to reduce confrontations between the police and residents.

Boehner said the deteriorating relationship between the police and blacks has become a national crisis.

{mosads}“I think that if you look at what’s happened over the course of the last year, you just got to scratch your head,” Boehner said.

The speaker said he didn’t think more money for education would help solve the crisis, saying it will take far more than more funding alone to “solve the education problem.”

But he called the charges against six Baltimore police officers in the death of Freddie Gray both “outrageous” and “unacceptable,” if proven true.

Boehner’s comments came as part of a wide-ranging interview in which he brushed aside the decrease in uninsured Americans, insisting ObamaCare is “not working and it’s not good for the country.”

The Ohio Republican also said he wasn’t particularly worried about what many analysts believe are leading contributors to congressional gridlock, including the gerrymandering of election districts, big-money lobbyists and the amount of money in politics.

But what Boehner would not weigh in on was the 2016 presidential race. He declined to make any real comment on the presumed Democratic nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

And while he acknowledged being a big fan of both former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, he made it clear he wasn’t planning on making an endorsement on the GOP side.

“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” he said, later adding of the growing number of candidates: “We’ve got a big field. It’ll sort itself out over the next year. Good luck to all of them.”

Tags Baltimore Body cameras John Boehner Sunday shows