Black Lives Matter chairman Hawk Newsome has called for defunding the police across the country so that crime can be treated like a national health crisis.

“I’m talking about is America treating crime as something that needs to be handled with policing instead of defunding the police and looking at crime from the perspective that it’s a health crisis. The same way we looked at heroin addiction when it was only black people as tough on drugs, war on crime, and when it became white people, we looked at it as a public health crisis, something that needs to be treated. That’s the way we need to look at crime, OK,” Newsome said on this week’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday.”

“You think about police. Over 80% of the calls are not violent felonies. Therefore, we should really look into why police are being called. Look at the causes of why people are committing crimes, they are desperate, they’re poor, they’re undereducated, and they are left out to dry but this American system of government. So if you want to decrease crime, you don’t hire police to come in and arrest everybody and brutalize people. If you want to cure crime, you must go to the source. You must invest in people. You must give people jobs. You must make people employable. If you look at places with the highest murder rates, have the highest rates of unemployment. So let’s start talking about entrepreneurship programs in our community. Let’s start talking about schools that actually meet the needs of people. That’s something we can do with the hundred billion dollars that this country spends on police.”

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