New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton came under fire Tuesday for embracing the controversial 1965 report by former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan that has long been attacked for blaming the ills of the black community on its residents.
"It's insulting and troubling for these extreme comments to be made by a top member of city government, and his comfort in doing so speaks to the challenges our city and country still face with racism," Veronica Bayetti Flores, a spokeswoman for Communities United for Police Reform,
told Politico.
The group is one of New York's top police reform organizations.
"While the rhetoric alone is unacceptable, it has real implications in how the officers under Bratton's command perceive and treat Black and Brown New Yorkers," Flores said.
In an interview with MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Bratton cited the report in a discussion about the spiraling murder rate in American cities.
"There is something going on in our society and in our cities," the commissioner said. "I had the occasion over the weekend to read Senator Moynihan’s famous treatise from the '60s. Go read that again.
"Talk about being prescient about what was going to happen, in black society, in terms of ... the disintegration of family, the disintegration of values, and it’s gone beyond just the black community," he said.
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Bratton did not say "Moynihan report," but it seemed clear that he was referencing the document written by Moynihan, who was working at the U.S. Labor Department during Democrat Lyndon Johnson's White House.
The formal name of the report is "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." Moynihan, who died in 2003, later became a Democratic senator from the Empire State. He also served in the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
The report has long been slammed for blaming the breakdown of the black family on African Americans without considering such issues as chronic unemployment, high crime — and the absence of nuclear families.
"I find it racist," Brooklyn Assemblyman Charles Barron told Politico.
"We were all livid by it," he added. Barron said he was nearing his active years with the Black Panthers when the report was released. "The Moynihan report, it put more of the blame on the victim."
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