very important to us as humans to get together and be overseeing the same songs together makes us feel like part of something and that's really important talking about mental health to feel like together it was amazing to see how. just fanatical people were and excited about being out and seeing live music and seeing something to drag them out of. a long brutal year. half past the hour these are the top stories doctors in iraq so at least 20 people have been killed after an explosion inside a baghdad hospital fire burned through a ward where covert 19 patients were being treated someone a full team has more from baghdad. the fire has already been put out the surviving patients have been transferred to nearby hospitals but many of them of course have been severely injured and we understand that the death toll may still rise and of

course this comes at a time when iraq is battling a 3rd in covert 9000 infections just last wednesday the country registered the highest number yet with over 8600 new coronavirus cases which was the highest since the onset of the pandemic and the total number of cases have now exceeded $1000000.00. headlines joe biden has become the 1st us president to formally recognize the mass killing of armenians during the ottoman empire as an act of genocide biden said his intention is not to cast blame but to ensure it never happens again turkey has rejected by the statement has since summons the u.s. ambassador on korean protest the armenian prime minister nico past you know meanwhile says it is a powerful step towards justice. southeast asian leaders are calling for an immediate end to the violence against civilians in may in ma they met the head of the military shooter at an age summit in jakarta a block agreed on

a 5 point plan based on dialogue india has set yet another global record number of new coronavirus cases 346000 infections in 24 hours many people are being admitted to hospitals because of a lack of oxygen beds. 53 sailors on board the missing submarine in indonesia are now presumed dead after debris from the vessel was discovered it was missing for days the submarine has officially been declared sunk and is lying at a depth of around $850.00 metres and russia has restricted access to the curch strait which was used by the ukrainian navy to access its eastern ports will be closed for 6 months for military exercises the bottom line is next on al-jazeera frank assessments. and taking for a situation like i'm not really. informed opinion is the u.s.

with thinking military positioning in the middle east or is it just a simple act of. us and this is a massive to the region the united states is rethinking your 2 military in-depth analysis of the day's global headlines inside story. hi i'm steve clemons and i have a question almost one year after the death of george floyd with the police knee on his neck is there any hope that this constantly replaying dynamic will ever change let's get to the bottom line. george floyd's death that they hands of minneapolis police almost one year ago sparked massive demonstrations and forced americans from all backgrounds to wonder about their police officers attitudes towards black americans now the nation braces for a verdict in the trial of derek chauvin he was the officer who kept his knee on floyd's neck for more than 90 minutes during his arrest but the problem sadly hasn't ended with the death of george floyd not far from where he died

a policewoman killed 20 year old dante write during a traffic stop just 2 weeks ago social justice activists say the list of killings at the hands of police just keeps getting longer and radical change is needed in the united states some argue that these are nothing but modern day black lynchings by other means but it's the movement to quote defund the police and send money to other social support needs loses traction what fixes are really out there today we're talking to not a junkie the president of the national conference of black lawyers which launched an international commission of inquiry on systemic racist police violence against people of african descent in the united states and is about to release those findings next week and professor james foreman jr who teaches law at yale university and is the author of the book locking up our own crime and punishment in black america thanks to both of you for joining us today and these are obviously tense times not i mean i know your report is about to come out but we also have a trial going on and

a verdict expected in the coming day or days with derek show and as we produce this show i am very aware that 3 black people on average in the united states will die in the next 24 hours as a result of police actions can you frame for us what the stakes are in the show in trial and its outcome right now. well the stakes are high as you know you know that the stakes are high in many ways we're looking at how is the jury going to make this decision what are they going to be talking about what are they going to be thinking about and how are they taking all the information that's been provided and obviously across the country and really across the world people are waiting to see whether or not this verdict is a reflection of things to come i think that when we look at this is national conference of black lawyers we look at this as something that is systemic this police violence is not just about derrick chauvet and so regardless of the verdict

you know we've been doing this work for the past 50 years addressing systemic police violence looking fundamentally at how this affects black liberation and human rights and we know that it's not just about one cop it's not just about one police department or when city that this is systemic violence that anti-black violence that needs to be addressed at its core and the goal of our commission of inquiry and of this report is to help folks to see how bad can happen what are the findings that this international commission made what are the recommendations and to bring this issue of the police violence in the united states against black people to the international arena and as families and organizations attempted to do less june and by bringing it to the united nations thank you for that james you and i have known each other for a couple of decades and i have been reading your writings and your thoughts and

concerns on exactly what we're talking about today over that period of time and just this last week in the washington post you and a co-author wrote that one of the other high risk actions that can shatter black lives is having expired tags or temporary plates on their car can you go further with that for us yeah absolutely and not very much since forward to seeing this report i think is going to be very important because i agree because you did it is a systemic issue you know when i was in law school. in the early ninety's was when the rodney king trial took place and i remember being sure that he was going to be convicted and i remember my having my face in the law and i was a critic i understood the history of racism in this country but but my classmates and i we are saw that video and and we were sure that he was and that those officers who knew him were going to be convicted and now here we are now waiting

for another verdict in another trial there's another generation of young black people my son is 11 years old we talk about his case every day and so so there's another generation of people that are looking and asking the question when somebody has been so clearly and brutally treated by the state murder isn't going to be accountability but but steve as you said that really is just the beginning and so the article that you're referencing that that my student t.j. grayson and i wrote together was really trying to make the point that as long as we have police doing so many of these functions that could be done by non police actors we are going to have unnecessary violence and we're going to have unnecessary racism and unfairness and i think go in forward the big challenge that we face as

a nation is yes to have accountability in these individual cases like what we're seeing right now in minneapolis but we really have to be asking ourselves do we need and want police to be doing as much as they have been tasked to do do we need them or are responding to people who are suffering from addiction people who are suffering from mental health crises do we need them in force in the traffic laws the way they have done now and so that's what that was really trying to do is to say look what if we created a non. force civilians on all armed who are responsible for keeping our roads and that's the kind of thinking i think that is going in that we're going to need to undertake as a nation go forward thank you for that i mean not what is your your thinking on that i mean i have to just be honest you know i've been to various shows on this i've been i have seen friends of mine pulled over because they were racially

profiled you know driving through a white community and i happen to be and i've seen this for years and years and years i interviewed former republican governor of new jersey chris christie and said in camden they had to basically reduce that police department down to its foundations get rid of officers and really institute very different training valid deming's congresswoman val demings former orlando police chief said we need to have a national commission on police i haven't seen any of these things happen broadly in the country and i thought after the george floyd protest after the murder and then the protests and so many other murders that we saw this past year something was going to change has anything really changed this last year. so i'm really glad that at my answer would be no chris mullin to deal with at birth my answer would be no and i guess we were going to law school at the same time but james but i was here in los angeles during the rebellion i'm doing the rodney king beating it's and

as well as the rebellion after the acquittal of the 4 cops that beat him and there was a christopher commission i mean there was all of this energy that went into making this different and you know from now on and as we see that hasn't been the case when did you we talk about where can we reduce the police force what can we do when you look at really looking forward to you brother james to use it to all of the folks at al-jazeera and the activist on the ground organizers other attorneys getting into this report because the commissioners heard 44 cases families and attorneys as well as organized as an act of this case by case including the cases in the family members of george floyd briana taylor botham jean kayla moore and others and then heard expert testimony from folks talking about historic violence all the way to andrea richie talking about police violence against black women

gender nonconforming and trance people and so these conversations are right in the report this analysis about these pretextual traffic stops about mental illness so many of these cases involve traffic stops involve people with mental illness involved people that are looking for help and calling the police to get some help and folks are ending up dead in and when case paralyze you know that we've looked at and so there's recommendations here that talk about of course the domestic issue and looking at what can be done to meth the cli with respect it all the way from training and reform all the way to some aspects of abolition where you're talking about defunding and the feigning the police you find all of that in the. report but there's also the conversations about and findings around the issue of how we take this in the international context what is the is there national rules about law enforcement in the use of force and the commission found

again and again that the united states the police in the united states don't only not follow the laws in the united states with impunity but violate international law and in fact the commissioners found really importantly you know and uniquely in this report that the systemic police violence against plec people in the united states constitutes a crime against humanity and the rome statute that it is that why it spread attack on a civilian population in this case black folks in the united states accomplish the murder through torture and other qualifying means it's really one of the main highlights of the report open analysis and in recognition i just want to underscore this point i found it so fascinating in thank you for letting me take a look at the report a bit early but you basically say we are unable to fix this and we need

international intervention we need the international criminal court to take action because the united states has proved itself an able to take the corrective measures broadly even need to be taken i just want to underscore that i have that right and what would be you know in short form because i know there are complexities there for some action like that to actually take place. well the independent prosecutor of the i.c.c. has the capacity under the rome statute to do it on their own they can go and just decide hey we're going to look into this we see that this happens with other countries for some reason there's a reticence saying some reason we know what they are but there's a reticence to do that when it comes to the united states and we're calling on that to happen we're also calling on the biden administration to voluntarily subject the united states to the jurisdiction of the i.c.c. for such an inquiry to happen this is an administration that indicated that black folks in his words brung him to the dance that it is because of black folks and the

work that we did in that in terms of voting and cetera that he and the democrats are in power right now this is an issue that they know must be addressed and one of the good faith actions should be to not just sign the treaty and all those pieces that take time but to immediately say yes the united states is open to the jurisdiction of the court will put itself under the jurisdiction of the international criminal court and allow there to be this inquiry at that level thank you for that james i use some powerful language in the opening of today's show and i and i talked about our legacy our horrible legacy in this country of black lynchings and how some have viewed this police brutality and these murders that we have seen not just recently but over a very long unending period of time actually as lynchings by other means but there have been some other changes in atmosphere in tools and tactics in the recent

decades like the global war on terror has ended up with police forces having equipment they would never have had had that not occurred and you've also and they're also complicit players in this that you've written about which i found so interesting and brave to a degree to say we've had black leaders in america that are also culpable that participate. in over incarcerating particularly men in the black community you know creating a culture that destroyed families and that kind of ripped the fabric apart to where we're at so i'd love to give you an opportunity to talk not just about this enduring problem but how both the those that have been part of it have been there but how things like the global war on terror backlashed you know in some of these issues as well. well i think that's right and and i think when you think about what happened in this country in terms of building mass incarceration and building these

this incredibly repressive set of police forces that operate in a lot of cities right in those really go hand in hand that there are a lot of people who played a role in helping develop that it was really a national it was bipartisan in many ways to even as you point out in my book is about is it crossed racial lines i do think that the black leaders and the black politicians who are pushing for this i am somewhat more sympathetic to their position that is a their motivation and in many cases i think it grew out of a real care and concern for their community in desperation they wanted to do something and the truth that they had it hand were so limited so they did turn to the police but nonetheless even though i'm sympathetic to their motives i am critical a lot of of the a lot of the decisions that were made in the 1980 s. in the 1990 s. the militarization is used and which is a result of some of this global war on terror and now i think the question that we face is how do we respond and how do we chart

a different path forward and i would just want to compliment what nano is saying about that international so she went up to the international level and i want to go down and say the other place i think we have the potential to resist and to fight back is it doesn't very local level at the very micro level so when you asked whether anything had changed in the last year i would say. that while police violence hasn't changed and racial profiling hasn't changed what has changed is this movement of activists and local organizers and young people my students i teach in a last minute so i see them every day they arrive with a fervor and a commitment and they're doing very smart things they're going to city councils they're going to county councils they're going to mayors offices to looking at the police union contracts and they're asking why do we have these collective bargaining agreements that allow police officers when they've shot somebody to have

7 or 8 or 10 days before they're even interviewed by investigator why are they allowed to look at the body camera footage before they file their police report why are we funding in our city's police to do things 10 and 15 and 20 times more money then we're funding school counselors and mental health and mental health counselors so i do think the one source of optimism that i see on the local level is i think that there is a incredible energy over the last 6 months over $140.00 laws have passed in cities and counties across the country in some way to roost restrict and reduce police violence and so i think if we can take that international that nonis pointing to and the very local that i'm pointing us to those together can be a complimentary account slower but that's that's heartening and thank you so much

for laying that out but you know it's after you know a couple of decades aging myself in this but you know looking at how very you know people from very different parts of the country the different corners of the nation see things differently gravity doesn't work the same everywhere i want to show a couple of graphs and not to get your response to it because at some point we need to come to some common ground and common understanding why i'm doing the show. so that people see and get an understanding of of the tensions that are the horrors that are really out there but we have this 1st chart which shows how many americans say police treat racial groups equally and if you talk to the black community 9 percent believe that they are treated equally 42 percent of whites that is a big gap in perception if you look at political party how many americans say police treat racial groups equally democrats 10 percent republican 64 percent so we've got

a racial divide and we clearly have party divides in this country in terms of the perception of these issues not and i know that your report had to deal with you know a cross-section of players but you had difficulty bridging to republican participation i just be interested in what you think it's going to take i mean is it just going to be you know a combat to get folks to pay attention or do you think there are ways to bring over you know some republicans and more members of the white community to understand the anguish and the injustice that your commission has has highlighted. so the commission's work wasn't necessarily on like us party lines right it was really looking at it you know with rick's posing this information and giving people the opportunity to see and to hear what is really happening and i will say this we had these hearings open to the public so people could join and you know just

like a regular zoom dad you had the chat on the side people asking questions and it was really clear that it was eyeopening i have been following these cases some of these cases you all have been following there were things that were talked about from family members and attorneys that made whatever we think was the horror even more clear in its depravity and horrible this heard things that i hadn't heard before and i think that that's part of it part of it is for people to really be able to hear from to see what's happening as opposed to living in their bubble if you're in your bubble and your bubble does not include black people your bubble does not include police violence then of course you're going to have those attitudes right and so i think it's really important if you go to our web site. international commission dot org you can actually hear the hearing still right now the report will be there soon i think it's important for people to actually hear from boston

james mother not snippets from a press release or a press conference but actually hear her talking for 30 minutes about what the murder of her son was what it did to her what it did to her family what it did to the country of st lucia and how it reflected you know upon them i think it's important for them to hear from kayla more attract black trans woman who was murdered to hear from her sister and to understand being trans and be having mental illness and how much the police violence impacts really vulnerable communities and so bad the work that the commission began led by n.c. . along with n l g n the international association of democratic lawyers last july with our commissioners again 12 commissioners from around the world for brilliant rapper toure as all of us led the able arms of attorney lennox hines to really bring this out to make those connections that james has talked about from the

international all the way to the local and back again so that we can finally address issues honestly and with some kind of you know i. am finding myself you know in this kind of discussion this kind of work to try to bring people's attention to things you know find when i was reading james foreman and his students piece this weekend you know about traffic tags and we had dante wright we also had lieutenant carone and there's ario hispanic who was stopped and i have to tell you it kind of takes you into this place where if we didn't have video and i have to tell you i have mixed feelings about you know video and surveillance and this i you know been spend a lot of time in china and see what facial recognition software and kind of a surveillance society looks like but i'm wondering to some degree whether of body cameras video surveillance we would not know about lieutenant zaria we would not know about many of these cases if in fact if we did not have i phones and

smartphones video recording this what are your thoughts is that the pathway out of this is basically a move to kind of keep police accountable and his and his video going to deliver us james. i don't think so we. can play a role as you said and we can all point to these examples. because of video we now know about them. i think that you know 5 years ago there was a lot of optimism pretty much across the political spectrum that for example body more cameras on police officers would have a significant impact on police use of force and this research is out and it doesn't not it just last we have about 30 seconds left and i know this is unfair but also in your report you you. write about the violations of the 4th amendment of the us constitution and i like. to have discussions wedged in

constitutional rights can you give us a quick snapshot of what rights are regularly violated black americans. so we're looking at you know the right to not be deprived of your liberty the rights of you know not being handcuffed not being detained at the right to you know to not be abused to not be beaten to not be subjected to excessive force you know those are the right to not be murdered to not be killed to not have the police act as. judge jury and executioner and i think that it's important again that we recognize as the group commissioners did that the u.s. rights are being violated as well as these international right right it doesn't have to be something that's just an international court they can start here in the united states as well right i'll read it the right of the people to be secure in their persons houses papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures

shall not be violated and no warrant shell issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized i just think that says a great deal not a jumpy president the national conference of black lawyers and james foreman jr professor of law at yale university thanks so much for being with us and sharing your candid thoughts. thank you thank you for having me so what's the bottom line for a society to function folks need to trust the police but for a black or brown man or woman remember sandra bland a routine traffic stop could lead to a life or death confrontation and this is just that point it's not part of any civilized society or democracy and it's got to be called out and changed it's about time that americans had an open and honest debate on the intersection of racism and policing in this country everything should be on the table including rewriting history limiting the use of police to enforce traffic laws less military style and

military outfitted policing changing the laws just whatever it takes to save lives and to create space to hopefully we start building trust across races in our society without trust that america is going to continue to boil and twist itself and did not and never move beyond what many call america's original sin and that's the bottom line. jump into the story there is a lot going on in this one julia not global community when i talk of all the

misinformation i think we all want to feed that we and be part of the debate don't ever take anybody's one word because there's always a difference when no topic is off the table we have been disconnected from our land we have been disconnected from who we are and would love to hear some new and e.t.p. part of today's discussion this streamed on out is the era. for dram meters syndrome would leave the families to pain is unbearable 4 of their relatives were killed last week during a military operation ordered by the vinous when government security forces accused them of being part of a colombian rebel group and said they died in combat but neighbors and family members insist they were innocent taken from their homes and executed under pressure been as well as the fence mr bloody made by breena said the armed forces were open lige to defend their country from the regular groups but added that human rights needed to be respected and that the events at the border with the 50 gated.

at least 20 people killed and many more injured after oxygen cylinders explode inside of baghdad hospital. santa maria this is the world news from al-jazeera it was president joe biden is labeled as genocide the killing of armenians a century ago in turkey to some of america's ambassador in protest.