Roy: Democrats’ Harmful & False Narrative About Our Nation’s Law Enforcement Officers Jeopardizes Americans’ Safety
WASHINGTON – Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Ranking Member Chip Roy (R-Texas) opened today’s hearing by emphasizing that Democrats are continuing to perpetuate a false narrative that law enforcement is inherently racist and primarily composed of white supremacists.
In his opening statement, Subcommittee Ranking Member Roy notes that evidence suggests there is no structural bias in our criminal justice system regarding arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Instead, Americans, many in low-income communities, are suffering from nationwide demonstrations that have devolved into violent, organized efforts to harm law enforcement officers and damage private property. By giving this harmful narrative a platform at this Committee, he concludes that cities are increasingly moving toward defunding their local law enforcement and jeopardizing the safety and security of Americans.
Below are excerpts of his remarks:
The chairman is always gracious to make sure that we have equal time and handle that in that respect and so I appreciate that and good to see it from afar.
As you know, this hearing is the fourth in our series on white supremacy and we’ve had a number of good exchanges and dived into some of the facts over the course of previous three hearings and I certainly think it’s important for us to do so. As you remember, I was particularly moved and wanted to understand the situation in Charlottesville, as a University of Virginia graduate, obviously that hit close to home and talking to a mother who lost her daughter sitting there in the downtown mall in Charlottesville where I used to go as a student and seeing this horrid series of events unfold it was important for us to have that conversation and I think it’s important for us to have this conversation.
I would note and the chairman knows I’ve been asking repeatedly the last year for us to have a hearing, for example on human trafficking there’s 40,000,000 people around the world suffering from human trafficking, some 20,000 in the United States where we had actual law enforcement engagement with them, which is a small fraction of what we know is actually occurring in the United States. Estimates of up to three or 400,000, I think we should find time on our schedule for hearings on matters such as that.
I don’t question the motives of the chairman, but I would have to acknowledge that it is fairly facially obvious over the last few months that my Democratic colleagues really want to perpetrate a narrative that American law enforcement is either systemically racist or composed of white supremacists and I just categorically reject that characterization of the almost 800,000 law enforcement personnel who are standing up on the thin blue line.
It is a dangerous path that my Democratic colleagues are pursuing in defining our law enforcement personnel as systemically racist and that’s what’s happening, that’s what this focus is doing, and by the way it wouldn’t matter if this hearing was just focused on law enforcement but Democratic colleagues have made it abundantly clear that the United States of America is in and of itself systemically racist and that’s the position of the modern Democratic Party.
There is a significant amount of evidence out there that suggests that there is not structural bias in the criminal justice system regarding arrests, prosecutions, or sentencing crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions. There are 70 million interactions roughly between law enforcement and civilians every year.
This committee, in my opinion, is giving a platform to harmful ideas.
I think this chairman and I understand what we’re doing here in the conversation we’re having, and these are important conversations, but we ought to be mindful of those 800,000 men and women who are going to suit up today to stand on that line for us.
We cannot continue to go after and blanketly condemn them as racist as an institution. I yield back.
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