Police shootings around the country have helped put local politics in the spotlight, says Duke University's Mark Anthony Neal. Neal points to local prosecutors' critical role in deciding whether or not to pursue charges.
Neal is a professor of English and African and African American Studies at Duke University.
Transcript:
From Duke University, this is "Glad You Asked," where we consider the question "What should we be talking about this election season?"
“I am Mark Anthony Neal, professor of African and African American Studies and professor of English at Duke University.
You know for me the thing that we could be talking about more is this issue about the responsibilities of prosecutors in police shootings. Body cameras are attempting to change how we think about these interactions particularly for law enforcement and for urban and black communities. But for me, the body cameras only do part of the story. You know we actually will see what happens in the context of what gets captured with body cameras. Then it goes to a district attorney and we don’t see indictments.
So I think those are cases where we should see special prosecutors appointed. It is a conflict of interest if you’re expecting a district attorney to hold law enforcement accountable and that same district attorney needs law enforcement to do their job effectively.
You know politics is always local. And I think we have now suddenly seen a kind of shift – we spent a lot of time particularly since 2008 focusing on national politics and that’s important. But very often I think we’ve paid so much attention on the national issues that we haven’t paid attention at what happens on a local level.
What we’ve seen with these DA cases in Cleveland and Chicago is that folks are recognizing that some of the real power occurs on the local level. We’ve seen the way that the legislature here in North Carolina was split for the first time in a century. What’s gone down in terms of voting rights in this state, the debates that we are having now about bathrooms.
That’s all stuff that’s connected to local politics and I think because of these police shootings and the very national focus that we’ve seen on them around the role and power of district attorneys, suddenly that has allowed folks to think more sophisticatedly about politics on the local level.”
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