Race is still an unavoidable part of the conflict over policing, and it will have to be dealt with as people work to defuse the tensions that have boiled over this year between cops and communities, Harvard University law professor Charles Ogletree told
Newsmax TV on Monday.
"We can't take race out of it because race does matter," Ogletree, founder of Harvard's Charles Hamilton Institute for Race and Justice, told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner.
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Ogletree said that black and brown men die at the hands of police at a higher rate than people in any other demographic, and that that holds true "whether the police officers are black or white or brown or male or female."
He said the protests touched off by the deaths of two black men in particular, Eric Garner and Michael Brown, reflect "a level of frustration that goes through our community."
But he also described himself as the brother of a murdered police officer — a sister who was killed 20 years ago in California — and said that "the reality is that we have to respect how difficult it is for these officers."
Ogletree said that condolences are due to the families of slain New York City police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos — who were murdered on Saturday in Brooklyn by
a man vowing revenge for Garner's death — as well as to the families of Brown and Garner.
He described the officers as "innocent men who were doing their job."
"And yet they lost their lives," he said, "and that's something we're going to have to live with a long time."
Ogletree also said that some of the most forceful denunciations of violence against police have come from people wrongly accused of either inciting harm, such as the Rev. Al Sharpton, or of putting racial politics ahead of public safety, such as President Barack Obama.
"People who have said that, who believe that, are completely wrong," he said.