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Bernie Sanders on Race & Criminal Justice

“When you see the kind of force that’s been used in Ferguson, it really does make it appear that the police department there is an occupying army in a
hostile territory and that is absolutely not what we want to see in the U.S.” ~Bernie Sanders
So bitter the irony, given that in 1995 Sanders voted against a measure prohibiting the police acquisition of the very same tanks and armored vehicles as the ones he decried the use of by our military abroad and police in Ferguson, Missouri during the riots following the police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014.
“We have got to reform a very, very broken criminal justice system…It breaks my heart, and I know it breaks the hearts of millions of people in this country, to see videos on television of unarmed people, often African-Americans, shot by police. That has got to end.” ~Bernie Sanders, 2016
Apparently, it wasn’t ‘breaking his heart’ until a broken heart became a better look on his presidential campaign trail, because the spirit justice didn’t move Sanders until 2016. After he’d long ago began casting votes in service to gun manufacturers and coming up with more ways to put ever-increasing numbers of young black men behind bars.