Trayvon was killed while wearing a hooded sweatshirt and taking a walk to buy some Skittles candy at the corner store. Jordan Davis was shot in Jacksonville, Florida, while listening to music in a car that a white man thought was too loud and too “thug.” Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was playing in a Cleveland park with a toy gun when he was shot by a police officer. Eric Garner was choked to death by an officer after selling loose cigarettes on a Staten Island street. Some of the stories were about criminal gun violence; others, excessive force by police officers. These issues require different policy solutions and different political responses. But the common theme that ran through all the stories was race. And the anguish all these mothers felt was the same—anguish that no mother, no parent, should have to bear.
Jordan’s mother, Lucia McBath, remembers comforting her son after they heard about Trayvon’s murder on the news. Jordan didn’t know Trayvon. They lived in different parts of Florida. But the news hit him hard. “Mom, how did this happen to Trayvon? He wasn’t doing anything wrong,” he asked. Lucia didn’t have a good answer. Nine months later, Jordan was dead as well. Now Travyon’s and Jordan’s moms were sitting at the same table.
“We lay in bed, and on our bad nights, our dark nights, we stare at the ceiling and cry,” Gwen Carr told me. She’s the mother of Eric Garner. “We replay in our heads over and over what happened to our children.”
Hadiya Pendleton was a fifteen-year-old honor student when she was randomly shot in a Chicago park. Just a week before, she had performed with her high school band at President Obama’s second inauguration in Washington. “There are no words for what we go through every day just waking up,” her mother, Cleo, told me. “I didn’t have a voice after Hadiya passed. For like three or four days, the only thing I could do was open my eyes and scream, literally at the top of my lungs.”
My throat tightened as I listened to the Mothers tell these stories, watching them remain composed despite the shattering pain behind their words. The writer Elizabeth Stone says that having a child is like deciding to have your heart go walking around outside your body. The thought of something happening to your kid is unimaginable to any parent. These mothers had lived that nightmare.
They also faced different, deeper fears that I never had to think about. My daughter and grandchildren are white. They won’t know what it’s like to be watched with suspicion when they play in the park or enter a store. People won’t lock their car doors when they walk by. Police officers won’t pull them over for driving in the “wrong” neighborhood. Gangs aren’t likely to settle their feuds on the streets where they walk to school.
“As people of color, we feel the greatest impact of this injustice, of this inhumane treatment,” Gwen Carr said. “Some people say that we’re racist because we say ‘Black lives matter.’ We know that all lives matter, but we need people to understand that black lives matter also. So treat us as such. Don’t just treat us like common animals. We’re not. We’re American citizens, and we deserve fair treatment.”
Treating everyone with care and respect is especially important for the men and women charged with keeping us all safe. I feel strongly about this: the vast majority of police officers are honorable, brave public servants who put their lives on the line every day to protect others. As a Senator, I spent years fighting for first responders who served at Ground Zero and later suffered lasting health effects. They paid a terrible price for serving the rest of us. I also have the unique experience of being guarded around the clock for more than twenty-five years by highly trained men and women committed to take a bullet for me if a threat ever came. If that doesn’t teach you to respect the courage and professionalism of law enforcement, nothing will. The officers I’ve known have been proud of their integrity, disgusted by the use of excessive force, and eager to find new and better ways to do their jobs. Every time a police officer falls in the line of duty—something that happens with sickening frequency—it’s a reminder of how much we owe them and their families.
Throughout the campaign, I had many meetings and discussions with law enforcement members to hear their views about what we could do better. In August 2016 I met with a group of retired and current police chiefs from across the country, including Bill Bratton from New York, Charlie Beck from Los Angeles, and Chuck Ramsey from Philadelphia. They stressed the importance of building relationships between their officers and the communities they serve. They also stressed that part of what we owe our officers is honesty and a willingness to confront hard truths.
One hard truth we all have to face is that we all have implicit biases. I have them, you have them, and police officers have them: deeply ingrained thoughts that can lead us to think “Gun!” when a black man reaches for his wallet. Acknowledging this during the campaign may have cost me the support of some police officers and organizations, who seemed to think my concern for dead children and other victims showed a presumption of wrongdoing by police. That stung. But I was grateful for the support of other law enforcement officers who wanted to rebuild bonds of trust that would make them and all of us safe and who thought I was the best candidate to make that happen. Dallas Sheriff Lupe Valdez said at the Democratic National Convention, “We put on our badges every day to serve and protect, not to hate and discriminate.” She and other officers believe, as I do, that we can work together to improve policing without vilifying the men and women who put their lives on the line to do it.
As a candidate, I worked with civil rights advocates and law enforcement leaders to develop solutions that would help, from body cameras to new training guidelines for de-escalating tense situations. I also spoke often about the importance of trying harder to walk in one another’s shoes. That means police officers and all of us doing everything we can to understand the effects of systemic racism that young black and Latino men and women face every day, and how they are made to feel like their lives are disposable. It also means imagining what it’s like to be a police officer, kissing his or her kids and spouse good-bye every day and heading off to do a dangerous but necessary job.
This kind of empathy is hard to come by. The divisions in our country run deep. As Maria Hamilton said to me, “It’s been like that for five hundred years, Hillary. People just haven’t been talking about it.” Her unarmed son Dontre was killed in 2014, shot more than a dozen times by a police officer in Milwaukee after a scuffle in a public park, where he had fallen asleep on a bench. Her words were a reminder that for these mothers and generations of black parents before them, the killing and mistreatment of young black men and women was tragic but not shocking. This has been the reality of life in America for a long time. But we can’t accept it as our inevitable future.
Maria’s words pointed to the complex relationship between race and gun violence. It is not a coincidence that it is the leading cause of death for young black men, outstripping the next nine causes of death combined. That is the result of decades of policy choices, neglect, underinvestment, gangs and thugs, and adversarial policing in communities of color. That said, it’s a mistake to think that gun violence is a problem just for black people or poor people or only in cities. Gun violence touches every class, color, and community, with thirty-three thousand people dying from guns each year—an average of ninety a day. That’s a particularly devastating fact because gun violence is largely preventable. Other developed nations don’t have this problem. They have commonsense laws to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. Those laws work. They save lives. The United States has made a cruel choice as a country not to take simple steps that would help prevent—or at least lessen—this epidemic.