On Friday night, MSNBC held a townhall, hosted by Chris Hayes. During the broadcast, Hayes asked local activist Ja’Mal Green to discuss the relationship between the black community and the Chicago Police Department. Green took the opportunity to take a direct shot at Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Here’s what Green had to say:
GREEN: So first of all, if you want to talk about the trust with the police and black people, there’s never been trust. All right, so that’s number one. Number two is that if you look at the numbers, 75% of murders go unsolved, so obviously they’re not doing their job, and they haven’t been doing their job in years. But hopefully Superintendent Eddie Johnson can do something about the police culture. But if we’re talking about violence, police isn’t the answer. You can put 100,000 police officers on the street and that will not reduce violence in the city of Chicago because police are only there to react. They’re only there to react. You have to put money into prevention, and right now nobody has really said it, but his name is Rahm Emanuel, and this mayor that we have in the City of Chicago does not care about black people. And I’m going to put that on the record. When you can invest $100 million into DePaul basketball arena when they can practice at the United Center for free and $16.4 million into Uptown to build upscale apartments. When you can build new bus stops downtown, but walk in our neighborhoods and not a million is coming. We walk past boarded up schools, boarded up houses. They’re knocking down with red X’s with no plan to redevelop. Mental health facilities shut down. The unemployment rate is higher in Chicago than around the country. If you want to talk about violence, you’ve got to talk about the economics, not police.
Now, Green seems to take every opportunity he can to gain publicity for his activism against Chicago police, so it’s no surprise that MSNBC made sure he was in the audience for this event and had the chance to grab the microphone.
Regardless, it’s clear that Emanuel faces an even steeper fight for re-election in 2019 if conditions in the city remain unchanged.