Cory Booker Cites Marijuana Enforcement As Example Of Racial Injustice That Is Motivating Protests

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) is highlighting systemic social issues—including racial disparities in marijuana enforcement—that need to be addressed as people across the country march in response to police killings of black Americans. As protests erupt in the wake of a Minneapolis police officer’s suffocating George Floyd to death, which was proceeded by a fatal Louisville police shooting of Breonna Taylor in a botched drug raid, Booker said it’s important for people to be “actively confronting the truth within our society of raising it up so there can be a deeper healing.” Part of that truth is that racial disparities have long existed within the U.S. criminal justice system, and an example of that is the disparate enforcement of cannabis criminalization against minority communities, Booker said in the Friday interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. Watch Booker’s marijuana comments, starting around 5:05 into the video below: “Right now, the data that we see from employment information all the way to marijuana laws—where [there is] no difference between blacks and whites for using the drug, but there was more marijuana arrests in 2017 than all violent crime arrests combined, and blacks were four times more likely to be arrested for it,” he said. “These are data points that do not speak to the heart and the grievous realities that each one of those data points impact the lives of people who are being destroyed,” he said. People “can’t get a job, can’t get a loan from the bank for doing things that two…

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Source : MJ moment
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