together we can raise the level of mutual trust that policing is built on the idea that police officers are members of the community they risk their lives to protect and citizens in ferguson and new york and cleveland, they want the same thing young people marched for here 50 years ago, the protection of the law. i want to bring into the discussion cnn contributor l.z. granderson. but for the michael brown incident we wouldn t know what we know about ferguson. do you fear there are many fergusons out there and that ferguson might be typical of what you might find if the spotlight is shown? i don t know if it s typical but certainly you will find some racial behavior. if you look at what happened in cleveland, tamir rice if the department of justice went in there twice to criticize the department about the behavior then look at what s going on in chicago. just two weeks ago there was a report about the so-called black sights where police officers are
taking suspects and hiding them for two days while interrogating them off the books. when you start looking on what s been going on in major cities certainly you can think of smaller towns in the south, there are some fergusons, maybe not to the extent be. in the buildup to the march in selma, john lewis made the point that he worries lessons of nonviolence and nonviolent protests are being lost on america s youth. we saw that in ferguson. that is very unfortunate. there are ways to get the message out, having your voices heard. i think john lewis is the exactly right messenger to try to educate our youth about how do we make change? how do we achieve change in this country. i was thinking l.z. as i watched the footage from selma that john lewis was billy clubbed for people to exercise the right of the franchise, many of whom aren t carrying that out. i always burst at this notion
but not sort of people standing there and saying i am a member of a white supremacist organization, that although we see these inequalities that we think about how we combat them fundamentally differently? i think it is a a difference. i think the fergusons of the world, that is where racism needs the road today and it s bad. it s absolutely bad, but it s a different kind of situation. last year of a case in florida where a couple of police officers were exposed as having been supposedly involved in the clan. and those two were fired immediately. they opened a huge review of the cases in order to look at what cases they had fouled up. but it s a huge problem. i would say that relationships between police and community is the new civil rights movement in many ways. do you feel like you have the sufficient clearly the
department of justice where they have to take recommendations and come to find some middle ground. if the city does not do that if they can t come to an agreement that satisfies the department of justice, the department of justice can sue the city and will almost every case win that lawsuit. so essentially, what s happening now. city officialvise to work the department of justice to appease them, to show them that yes these things you ve outlined we re going to fix them. and very likely they ll sign what they call a consent decree which typically includes policy changes and in this type of case could include disbanding the police department. i m wondering what you made of reading this report and the reaction to it. as we say on the one hand it s just about ferguson but do you read this and say how many fergusons are out there? this is not time in the obama administration where they have had this investigation.
we need full-scale systemic change. what s interesting or ironic is that we are approaching the 50th anniversary this weekend of the march on selma. selma, alabama, one major as peck of the civil rights movement. aspects of the civil rights movement. as you make comparisons between the way the legal system was used during the time of the segregated south and what s happened in ferguson missouri you wonder is there the need for another civil rights movement on these specific issues? how many other federals are there? fergusons are there? reporter: the truth is there are fergusons every day around the country. it s not just about the death of a particular teenage boy or girl, it s about systemic problems with law enforcement, how black bodies are viewed in full public space. that s the challenge here. what we saw in selma was the spectacle of protest. we saw the as dr. king would say, the dramatization of a circumstance. we also saw a link between civil action and legal change.