WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr said on Sunday that he did not believe racism was a systemic problem in policing, echoing other top administration officials’ defense of an important part of President Trump’s base as protests against police killings of unarmed black people continued across the nation.
“I don’t think that the law enforcement system is systemically racist,” Mr. Barr said in an interview with the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “I think we have to recognize that for most of our history, our institutions were explicitly racist.”
Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, made similar remarks on Sunday in an interview with “This Week” on ABC, saying that “systemic racism” was not an issue for law enforcement.