Attorney General Eric Holder told MSNBC’s Joy Reid that “we, as a nation, have failed” due to ongoing distrust between communities of color and the police. The three-part interview begins today on “The Reid Report” (MSNBC, 2-3 p.m. ET).
Holder sat down with Reid at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee in a one-on-one interview to discuss race relations in America, his tenure and his relationship with Congress.
JOY REID: Do you believe that African-American and Latino young people should fear the police?
ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: I don't think that they should fear the police. But I certainly think that we have to build up a better relationship between young people, people of color, and people in law enforcement. There is distrust that exists on both sides. There's misunderstanding that exists on both sides. And so there is work that our nation has to do. It's what the President has asked me to do in going around the nation and having these—these interactions. And it's what we are, as an administration, committed to doing—to building trust that—that does not now exist but that has to exist. It has to exist.
REID: Well, I'm struck, in listening to you—a deputy attorney general, going back to about the year 2000, 2001. In a similar case in New York, Amadou Diallo, a young West African immigrant who was shot in the vestibule of his own apartment building. What does it say that we essentially are in the same exact place now, so many years later?
HOLDER: It means that we, as a nation, have failed. It's as simple as that. We have failed.
