How Hillary Clinton is campaigning on race and crime: 'She must own her role'

One of Jamira Burley's earliest memories is watching two of her teenage
brothers, ages 14 and 15, face trial for murder. Thirteen of her 15 siblings
have spent time incarcerated, and in the course of one year she lost a
brother to gun violence and her father was convicted of murder.
When she was five, her legs were too short to reach the courtroom floor.
Now 27, she'll travel the country for Hillary Clinton, whose husband
supported "tough on crime" plans that disproportionately affected black
Americans, to talk about crime and punishment.
On Monday, Burley joined the Clinton campaign as deputy millennial
vote director, after leading a program on gun violence and justice at
Amnesty International.
"I'm well aware of the damage the criminal justice system has done to
communities of color," she said with qualified praise for Clinton as the
first candidate in over 15 years to put gun violence on the national stage.
"One of the things that I admire about Secretary Clinton is she's not
afraid to admit when she's wrong," she said. "She realizes the damage
our criminal justice system has done to the American population, and she
wants to make reform in ways that's not harmful to communities and
future generations."
Clinton, she said, has "been willing to own up to it, and she's been
willing to right her wrongs".
In the early 1990s, Philadelphia saw gun murder rates spike to record
highs alongside crime related to the national crack epidemic. Academics
and politicians warned of violent young offenders, and by the middle of
the decade, some predicted the rise of " juvenile super-predators".
As first lady, Clinton herself seemed to endorse that notion in 1996.
"They are often the kinds of kids that are called 'super-predators', no
conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way
but first we have to bring them to heel," she said at the time.
Activists have argued that Clinton should be held responsible for the
impact of her husband's 1994 crime bill, which imposed draconian
enforcement that disproportionately increased arrests in black
communities, specifically for drug-related crimes.
Clinton has been lambasted for her "super-predator" remarks in
particular, and her husband has struggled to fend off protesters who
raised it earlier this year. Michelle Alexander, the influential author of
the New Jim Crow, called the comments "racially coded rhetoric to cast
black children as animals" and has argued that Clinton did not deserve
the black vote.
After an activist interrupted a campaign event in February and asked
Clinton about those controversial remarks, she apologized, saying she
"should not have used those words".
The activist, Ashley Williams, later said that the apology did not go far
enough. "She must own her role in the political disaster that befell Black
communities," she wrote.
Burley's brothers were young teenagers when they faced murder charges,
which were brought because the boys had been in a car with others who
committed the crime and the teens refused to inform on the others. They
were tried and convicted of third-degree murder, and Burley would not
see them again until they were in their late 20s.
Four of her brothers were still incarcerated, she said.
Burley said she planned to remind young people that support for the bill,
now seen as a " terrible mistake", was much broader at the time it was
passed. There were parts of the 1994 bill that her own mother favored,
Burley said, even though her mother was also affected by the justice
system herself.
"The crime bills of the 90s were supported by a very diverse group of
actors," Burley said. "My mother can tell you she supported getting more
police on the streets."
A majority of black Americans supported Clinton's crime bill in 1994
and it largely won passage through support from the congressional black
caucus. It was not without fierce, high-profile critics in the black
community, though: in 1994, the NAACP called the bill "a crime against
the American people".
Clinton has now pledged to "end the era of mass incarceration" through
several means: reforming federal mandatory minimum sentencing;
focusing federal law enforcement resources on violent crime, not
marijuana possession; investing billions of dollars in re-entry programs;
and reforming school discipline practices to end the "school-to-prison
pipeline".
She has also promised to address police violence against black
Americans, and said she would ask for $1bn to train police departments
on how to overcome implicit racial bias, develop national guidelines on
police use of force, and support legislation to end racial profiling.
"The fact that the Black Lives Matter movement and other criminal
justice reformers have held her feet to the fire has helped her become a
lot more sensitive to how she shows up in those spaces," Burley said .
Burley has been an advocate for gun violence prevention since her early
teens. After her 20-year-old brother, Andre, was murdered in 2005,
Burley started a program at her high school to train other students to be
violence "interrupters" and peer mediators. It later expanded to 10 other
high schools across the city. At age 23, just days after becoming the first
sibling in her family to graduate from college, she was hired as the
executive director of Philadelphia's youth commission. In 2014, the
White House honored her as a " Champion of Change" on gun violence
prevention.
At Amnesty, Burley focused on building a united approach to gun
violence, police violence and criminal justice reform, rather than
viewing those issues as separate, siloed problems. She also worked to
improve communication between Amnesty's largely white and middle-
class membership and young Black Lives Matter advocates across the
country.
Part of that work meant educating members about the unintended
consequences of some gun violence prevention policies – particularly
when policies are only evaluated from the perspective of white
Americans. After the Orlando nightclub massacre of 49 people, for
instance, Democrats, including Clinton and Barack Obama, pushed to
pass legislation barring Americans on terror watchlists from being able
to buy guns.
That seemed like an obvious move for many Americans. But at Amnesty,
Burley put out a statement opposing the "no fly, no buy" measures as
"false solutions to the real threats of gun violence and terrorism". The
plan threatened due process safeguards for Americans, particularly
minorities, she noted, given the often secretive and arbitrary nature of the
watchlists.