I'm one of those oddballs who simultaneously thinks being a cop is one of the hardest, bravest, and most traumatizing jobs a human being can do AND thinks systemic racism infects American policing via training, workplace culture, and how criminal statutes are written and enforced
Multiple times today, in honoring what the Michael Brown case *led* to—a new anti-police-brutality movement and a finding of systemic racism in Ferguson's police department and court system—I was told that I think "all cops are bastards" when that's not anything I've ever thought
What I realized is Trump shifted the ground on criminal justice reform in a way no one thought possible: from a left-and-right debate on what sorts of reforms are necessary to a left-and-racist debate on whether *every piece of evidence* confirms systemic racism exists in the CJS
What this means is that people like @JamesAGagliano who five years ago might have been responsible debating partners on the matter of how to reform the CJS are now—even if they don't mean to be—default proxies for the racist view that all disparate-impact CJS data must be ignored
Today Biden simply tweeted that Brown's case birthed a historic anti-police-brutality movement—it did—and became central to the fight against systemic racism by birthing a DOJ finding of systemic racism in Ferguson and @JamesAGagliano called Biden's words "shameful and repugnant"
But when I turn on @CNN I'm still going to find @JamesAGagliano there, as though he's simply the "other side" of a debate on CJS reform—when that debate has actually collapsed under Trump into Gagliano calling inarguable *historical* observations by Biden "shameful and repugnant"
What it makes me think is that either @JamesAGagliano never believed in being a responsible CJS-reform partner *or* he saw that Trump had collapsed the debate into being between people on the left and actual racists and decided that to stay relevant he had to take the latter view
Everyone should be able to agree on the facts—that DOJ found "no prosecutable conduct" in Brown's case (which isn't the same as a gold star) but systemic racism in the PD and court system that handled Brown's case—and that @JamesAGagliano can't is a really bad sign for CJS reform
What @JamesAGagliano has done is misunderstand that the Brown case is now a historic *series of events*, not just a narrow finding about Officer Wilson; to deny the historic importance of the DOJ findings in Ferguson—which *came out of the Brown case*—is a grave error of history 
I'm a big believer in due process, @JamesAGagliano, so inasmuch as DOJ found "no prosecutable conduct" in the Wilson-Brown exchange I accept the finding 100%—*without* mistranslating it as deeming Wilson's conduct somehow exemplary (as I certainly think that can still be debated)
But I'm also a big believer in not misquoting people, so unless and until @JoeBiden declares that Wilson engaged in prosecutable conduct in the Brown case, @JamesAGagliano, it's *you* who are pandering to *your* constituency by deliberately misquoting him and misframing his words
