Bill Clinton Spars With Protesters

Former President Bill Clinton got into a heated exchange with protesters on Thursday, pushing back against charges that anti-crime legislation and welfare reform passed during his tenure had devastated black communities.

A group of protesters interrupted the former president during a campaign appearance for his wife in Philadelphia. One person held up a sign that read, “Hillary is a murderer,” while another yelled that she should be tried for “crimes against humanity.”

The protesters were referencing Clinton’s 1994 Violent Crime Control and Prevention Act, which is now widely accepted to have sparked a wave of mass incarceration, especially among people of color. Hillary Clinton has come under fire for her support of that legislation, as well as decades-old comments regarding a now-debunked myth about child “super-predators” who were supposedly responsible for crime. She’s since apologized for those words.

“I had an assault weapons ban in [my version of the bill],” the former president said Thursday in defense of the 1994 legislation. “I had money for inner-city kids, for out of school activities, we had 110,000 police officers so we could put people on the street, not in these military vehicles, and the police would look like the people they were policing.”

“I talked to a lot of African-American groups — they thought black lives mattered,” continued Clinton. “They said, ‘Take this bill, because our kids are being shot in the street by gangs. We have 13-year-old kids planning their own funerals.’”

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-clinton-protesters_us_5706b117e4b0537661891a36