Democrat presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke said Thursday that he would make investigating police-involved shootings "a federal priority" through the Justice Department if he were elected to the White House next year.
"It would be a civil rights matter for the United States of America," O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman, said at the Presidential Town Hall sponsored by Newsmax and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines, Iowa.
"But we also withhold federal funding for those local police departments that fail to transparently report use of force and against whom it is used in America," he said.
More broadly, O'Rourke said, "we've got to understand that racism in this country is not just involved in the criminal justice system," adding that it is in the nation's educational, economic, and healthcare systems.
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