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Black Republican Tackles Police 'Trust Gap'

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina was still learning the ways of Washington, he says, when he saw a police officer following his car near Capitol Hill.

"I took a left...," he recalled in a speech Wednesday on the Senate floor, "and as soon as I took a left, a police officer pulled in right behind me."

That was his first left turn. His second came at a traffic signal. The patrol car was still following him. Scott took a third left onto the street that led to his apartment complex.

It was his fourth left, turning into his apartment complex, that brought the blue lights on. "The officer approached the car," Scott recalled, "and said that I did not use my turn signal on the fourth turn. Keep in mind, as you might imagine, I was paying very close attention to the law enforcement officer who followed me on four turns. Do you really think that somehow I forget to use my turn signal on that fourth turn? Well, according to him, I did."

Oh, did I mention that Tim Scott is African-American? He's the only black Republican in the Senate and the first to be elected from the South since 1881.

He did not get there by being a liberal or a Black Lives Matter radical. He's a "pro-life," anti-Obamacare and NRA-endorsed conservative.

 

He is also, whatever else you may think of his politics -- which are more conservative than mine -- a very likeable and thoughtful businessman from North Charleston whose family, as he likes to say with patriotic pride, "went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime."

Yet, issues such as police conduct and public safety have become personal for Scott. It was in his hometown, North Charleston, S.C., last year that a cellphone video showed Walter Scott (no relation), an unarmed 50-year-old black man, shot to death by a police officer from whom he was running away.

Two months later a gunman fatally shot nine people, including friends of Scott, at Charleston's historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Scott calls for a halt to abuses by police, but he also wants fairness for police and improved law enforcement.

One tragedy illustrated the dangers of bad policing. The other illustrated why we need good police.

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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