title:  Bernie Sanders Consoles Sister Of Police Violence Victim In Emotional Backstage Discussion (VIDEO)
text: On April 11th, before he spoke at his rally in Albany, New York, Bernie Sanders met with local Black Lives Matter activists.  The local police department has a long history of corruption and abuse. In April 2015, Albany Police Officers killed unarmed 39-year-old Dontay Ivy. While he was walking home from an ATM they tasered him and beat him to death with police batons. Mr. Ivy was mentally ill. In the video, his aunt takes Bernie Sanders through what happened. No officers were charged in the death and a grand jury found no criminal wrongdoing because of a lack of witnesses. Allegedly the dash cams in the patrol cars were turned off. I worried about my brother all the time. I thought outside elements would hurt him. But the people who were supposed to protect him, they re the ones who hurt him,  Dontay Ivy s sister, Johnson, told Senator Sanders in tears.Bernie Sanders has lead the call for police reform in the Democratic Primaries. He was the only candidate who called for a Department of Justice investigation in December 2015 after it was announced there would be no indictment of the police officers involved. He was the only candidate who called for Mayor Rahm Emanuel to resign over his administration s overt cover up of unarmed teenager LaQuan MacDonald s death. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who has proposed that the Department of Justice investigates every death caused by police involvement or in police custody so police departments can t cover up the incidents or protect their own from being held accountable for their actions. I got the racial profiling issues, I got it. And I got the need for police reform. What we should be doing is training police officers to deal with issues, although this doesn t seem to be a terribly difficult issue, this is not like somebody with a weapon or anything. It s a guy walking down the street, right? Going home. It s not exactly a major crime,  Bernie Sanders told the group backstage. What we don t have yet is a culture in this country that says to the police departments that lethal force, in this case using a Taser several times is a last resort, not a first resort, right? Clearly, in this particular case, it can be dealt with in a hundred different ways. The full video below, released by the Albany chapter of Black Lives Matter, shows the group s entire discussion backstage at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, New York. https://www.facebook.com/BLMUpstateNY/videos/1084906804903398/Featured image via Flickr