On Thursday’s episode of “The View,” the co-hosts reacted to the recently released body cam footage of the shooting death of 16-year-old Ma’Kiah Bryant by police earlier this week. While co-host Sunny Hostin expressed outrage and sadness at the incident, bringing up the treatment of Bryant versus police response toward white individuals like Aaron Long, Meghan McCain had a very different opinion. “I understand everything Sunny is saying, I hear you loud and clear,” McCain acknowledged. “I just disagree in this situation because she was about to stab another girl and I think the police officer did what he thought he had to do.”
Whoopi Goldberg showed viewers the disturbing footage, and a clip of CNN’s Don Lemon also defending the police by noting that they responded to a dangerous incident where an individual was armed. That was McCain’s defense for her own defense of law enforcement in this situation.
“This one is harder for me, and if there’s one thing I learned from the MeToo movement, it’s that I’m going to take everything by case by case by case situation and I don’t think that everything is always comparable,” she said carefully. “I don’t know enough about police protocol, but I do know had she been able to successfully stab the girl she possibly could’ve hit an artery, she possibly could’ve killed the girl herself. I thought many things too…I thought, where are the parents in this situation? Where was the parent to try to de-escalate the situation or the foster parent at the time, in the beginning?”
McCain noted that similar to co-host Joy Behar’s feelings, the situation was hard for her to talk about. “The way I was raised is to respect authority , to respect police officers, to respect law enforcement. I have a lot of friends who are in the military and who are also police officers,” McCain said. “But working on this show and experiencing what I’ve experienced over the past few years, no one without two brain cells in their head can understand that police tend to treat African Americans and people of color a different way than they do white people. And it’s just a fact we’re all trying to reconcile and come to terms with.”
Watch the video below.
