Police chief on why he knelt with protesters in a show of support
Schenectady, New York Police Chief Eric Clifford on importance of showing the community he serves that black lives matter.
An upstate New York police chief told “Fox & Friends First” on Wednesday he was inspired to take a knee and marched with peaceful demonstrators over the weekend because he felt “what the protesters were feeling at the time.”
“I could feel the passion in their voices and when I was asked to take a knee I felt it was something very small that I could do to support them and why they were there and I decided to do it,” Schenectady Police Chief Eric Clifford said.
“When I did it, all the officers that were there, both that worked for me and that were there to support us during this protest, they all took the knee too and it was a pretty amazing moment.”
On Sunday, Clifford engaged in the now commonly seen practice to condemn brutality that was started four years ago by professional athletes including former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who last played for the San Francisco 49ers.
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Protests were sparked by the May 25 death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a Minneapolis cop, Derek Chauvin, was seen kneeling on his neck in a viral video. Chauvin has been fired and charged with third-degree murder.
“The very vast majority of police officers, come to work every day, especially during this pandemic, they do very hard work, they’re putting their lives on the line literally and a few bad apples should not define the profession,” Clifford said on Wednesday.
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“But we do need to recognize as a profession that the community is hurting when they see things like what they’ve seen and that we have to do our best to project to them that we are working harder to be better at what we’re doing.”
Clifford stressed the importance of police officers being immersed in the communities they serve and protect.
“We have to do what we can as a profession to show the community that we care,” Clifford said.
“One of the reasons we were able to do what we did in Schenectady was that there was many members of the community in the crowd of protesters that I knew and I trusted and they trusted me so they trusted me enough to allow me to speak and they spoke to the protesters and asked for them to give me that respect, they made sure there would be no violence after I spoke and then when they asked me to march with them, that level of trust was already there,” he went on to explain.
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“We decided to walk together because we had gotten to that point in a few short minutes by taking a knee that we all figured out real quick that we were in this together.”
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