The head of the biggest group of police chiefs in the US apologised on Monday for the role law enforcement has played in the country’s historical persecution of African Americans and other minorities.
Terrence Cunningham, the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), said police needed to understand that deep and intergenerational mistrust had been caused by officers being the “face of oppression” during a “dark side” of American history.
“For our part, the first step in this process is for law enforcement and the IACP to acknowledge and apologise for the actions of the past and the role that our profession has played in society’s historical mistreatment of communities of colour,” said Cunningham.
Cunningham, who is the police chief of Wellesley, Massachusetts, made his remarks to fellow law enforcement executives gathered in San Diego for the annual convention of the IACP, a 123-year-old association of about 18,000 senior police officers in dozens of countries.
His statement was the deepest public expression of regret by a law enforcement official of his standing since unrest over police treatment of African Americans spread across the US after an officer fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.
Cunningham on Monday lamented that police officers had in the past been duty-bound to enforce laws “ensuring legalised discrimination or even denying the basic rights of citizenship”.
But at the same time, he argued, present-day critics of the police must accept that “today’s officers are not to blame for the injustices of the past” if trust is to be rebuilt where it has deteriorated between police officers and the people they serve.
“Overcoming this historic mistrust requires that we must move forward together in an atmosphere of mutual respect,” said Cunningham, who paid tribute to what he called a “noble profession” pursued by thousands who “laid down their lives for their fellow citizens”.
Attorney general Loretta Lynch and FBI director James Comey have both used their own speeches at the convention to argue that better government data on the use of force by police would go some way to improving police-community relations.
The FBI last week expanded on plans announced in December last year to improve its much-derided system for counting the fatal use of force by police officers.
A separate section of the justice department is also reviving a more comprehensive program for recording deaths in custody, which mirrors The Counted, an ongoing investigation by the Guardian counting every killing by police in 2015 and 2016.
“These are preliminary actions, but their significance is unmistakable,” Lynch told the conference earlier on Monday. “Better information helps everyone.”
