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Officer Who Shot And Killed Rayshard Brooks Was Reprimanded In 2017 For Use Of Force Involving A Firearm; Key Model Projects Over 200,000 Americans Will Die By October; Rayshard Brooks' Family Demands Justice After His Killing. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired June 16, 2020 - 07:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[07:00:00]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN NEW DAY: We want to welcome our viewers in the United States and all around the World. This is New Day.

And another desperate call for justice, this time from the family of Rayshard Brooks. Brooks was remembered at a vigil last night, days after being shot to death by Atlanta police.

Overnight, we learned that the fired officer who shot and killed brooks was previously reprimanded for use of force. Atlanta's mayor calls Brooks' death a murder. She is taking immediate action, she says, to tighten the rules on use of force by an officer.

And today, President Trump is expected to issue an executive order on policing in America.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN NEW DAY: Well, the pandemic is not over. In fact, there is sobering, new coronavirus projection this morning. A key model used by the White House says that a second wave of the virus is coming earlier than anticipated. And now, more than 200,000 Americans could be dead just by October. That is 30,000 more deaths than last week's projection. It is being attributed to premature relaxation of social distancing.

Right now, cases are on the rise in 18 states around the country. Eight of those states experiencing increases of more than 50 percent. And this includes Oklahoma, that where President Trump is planning to hold his rally on Saturday, in a crowded, indoor arena, just the kind of place that health experts warn is easy for the virus to spread.

Joining us now, CNN Political Correspondent Abby Phillip and Cedric Alexander, former President of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. Thanks to both of you for being on.

Cedric, if I could begin with you. If you look at what we understand of the president's executive order today, as well as what's emerging from Republicans, it is about incentivizing good police practices through things, such as funding, accreditation of police departments around the country, rather than requiring changes. For instance, if you look at the Democratic proposal, there's a straight-up ban on the use of chokeholds. I wonder -- and you served as a police officer for some time -- does that work? Does incentivizing work, or must there be required changes?

CEDRIC ALEXANDER, FORMER PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF BLACK LAW ENFORCEMENT EXECUTIVES: I think there are going to have to be a variety of changes that take place that encompass both what the president may be recommending, as much as we know now, but certainly what the Democrats are proposing take place.

Because here's what we have here in this country -- people in this country, at this very moment, because of the anger and the sadness that people are going through, they want to see tangible changes, tangible changes that takes place in American policing, things that they can see, things that they can touch, things that's going to make a difference in their lives and on the street when they come in contact with police in this nation.

So, it's going to be very interesting to see as both sides of the House put their plan out on the table, and it's certainly going to be interesting today to see what the president is going to present. But I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt at this point and see if something surprisingly happens that's going to be a great benefit for people at large.

But one thing I am confident about, on the other side of the House, on the Democratic side of the House, I'm quite sure their proposals are going to be very much, very much in touch with what people need in this nation. It just doesn't incentivize policing, but it also provides confidence for the American public in their policing in their communities across the nation.

CAMEROTA: Abby, on that front, Senator Tim Scott says that the details of his plan will be available soon, maybe in the next 24 hours. President Trump, meanwhile, is doing an executive order. Just out of curiosity, why isn't he taking the tact of working with the Democrats in Congress or the Republicans in Congress to craft some sort of legislation? Why resort to an executive order instead?

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, I don't think that this necessarily is to take away from the substance of what is being done or the debate about that substance. But when the president decides to move forward with an executive order, that is a political signal to the American public that he's doing something.

This has been a tough period for President Trump in which, by and large, the American people believe he has not handled these protests very well, and they have been looking for him to show some sense of understanding about what these protesters are out on the street protesting for.

[07:05:07]

So, I do think this executive order is designed to signal that specific thing that President Trump himself is responsive to what is going on. The White House is also working alongside Republicans on Capitol Hill, but that's going to be a long, potentially messy, process. And it does seem that the president is actually the one to say, no, we don't believe that certain things should be in that bill. For example, on the issue of qualified immunity, they have drawn a red line on that.

So, they are putting that legislation in a box but sending a political signal by appearing at the White House to roll this out in a grand fashion. And I think it's responsive to the fact that his poll numbers have been dismal on this issue.

SCIUTTO: Cedric Alexander, when you look at the big-picture issues here, because one of the issues being discussed is what force is used, right, a ban on chokeholds, like we saw in the death of George Floyd, but one commonality with so many of these cases is when and how police intervene, right?

I mean, you look at these teenagers in Oklahoma, they were just walking down a street, right, when police came in and tossed them in a patrol car. I mean, Javier Ambler, he didn't dim his lights when he passed police officers. George Floyd, you know, the allegation was passing a counterfeit $20 bill, and yet, you have this overwhelming force.

Again, as a police officer here, do you need a culture change, right, more than banning one thing or the other, incentivizing one thing or another? Is it a culture change that is necessary, in your view?

ALEXANDER: It's always been a culture change. And I've been saying this for some years along with a number of my colleagues. And here what you have is that we've got to go back and begin to look at, what are the calls for service that officers are going to? What are they being called to? What are their interactions? I think a lot more training needs to be done. But I'm going to dig a little deeper than that.

I also think we have to begin to look at who it is that we are hiring, because you've got to hire people who have a sense of compassion and people who have a moral compass and can use good judgment. So, the changes that we're looking forward to from our Congress, who are working together, as Abby stated, who are working together to bring some new legislation, that is one thing.

But at a local level, at a very local level, governments are going to have to look at who it is that we are hiring, because a lot of the interactions that we see and the judgments that are made, to be perfectly honest with you, there has to be a sense of compassion. How do you approach young, juvenile kids? How do you approach someone who has a fake $20 bill and it ends up in a death? These are the kind of things, oftentimes, that are at the fault of the way we are hiring, who we're hiring, how we're training them, and more importantly, how they're being supervised. And all three of those things have to go together at one time.

But the cultural change, that's not writing a policy. It's actually influencing behavior. But you've got to have good people to start out with to make sure they're providing the very best service to your community.

CAMEROTA: Cedric, I have one more policing -- sorry, I have one more policing question for you before we go back to Abby. We know a little bit more about the officers who were involved in the Rayshard Brooks case. And here is just what we know.

Garrett Rolfe, who has been fired, who is the one who fired the deadly shot at Rayshard Brooks, had two firearm discharges. There was a use of force complaint against him in 2016 and a written reprimand was issued the following year in 2017. There were several citizen complaints but no actions were taken.

Then Officer Brosnan, who's been on administrative duty, has two firearm discharges, including Friday night's shooting, which Is interesting to me because I'm not sure that he fired his -- well, we don't know -- we don't have details about him firing his gun. Maybe they meant the taser, or maybe there's more information that's going to come out.

But in any event, back to Garrett Rolfe, the idea that he would have had a complaint from the public on use of force and receive a written reprimand, unusual, noteworthy, or is this kind of standard?

ALEXANDER: It is in many ways is noteworthy in the sense that we have to remember that when engaging public, oftentimes complaints are made and sometimes they are valid, sometimes they are not. But in a case where there's been a reported reprimand, some disciplinary action has been taken, you begin to look now for patterns.

And if you begin to see patterns that begin to emerge over time, then that department, those supervisors -- going back to what I was saying just a moment ago -- those supervisors then have to begin to take some corrective action, bring it to those officers' attention, and pay more attention to their behaviors on the street and also their behaviors and attitude around the police station.

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Because oftentimes, those attitudes are seen. You think about a guy like ex-Officer Chauvin in Minneapolis, the number of complaints he received over time. But the question still remains to me, how did he survive inside that Minneapolis community police culture as long as he did? And we saw his behavior-attitude-personality acted out on the street. There was indicators long before that day, long before.

And you have to make sure as supervisors we get in, we talk to our folks, we get some self-correction, or we take the necessary action that needs to happen so that when these things do occur, we try to get in front of them the very best that we can.

SCIUTTO: Cedric Alexander, Abby Phillip, thanks to both of you.

ALEXANDER: Thank you for having me.

SCIUTTO: Experts now believe there will be a second wave of coronavirus and that it's coming sooner than we think. We're on top of the story. Stay with us.

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CAMEROTA: Breaking overnight, South Korean officials say North Korea has blown up a shared liaison office on the border with South Korea. A plume of black smoke could be seen rising above this site. This provocation comes after Kim Jong-Un's sister threatened military action over the weekend. South Korea is warning the North of a, quote, strong response to any further aggression. The White House has not yet responded.

SCIUTTO: This morning, a key model used by the White House now predicts that more than 200,000 Americans will die from coronavirus by October. Right now, cases are on the rise in 18 states, eight of those states experiencing increases of more than 50 percent.

Joining us now, CNN's new Medical Analyst, Dr. Rochelle Walensky. She is Chief of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital. Doctor, welcome this morning and welcome aboard at CNN. It's good to have you.

DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: Good morning. Good morning. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

SCIUTTO: So, this IMHE model, which we should note, the White House depends on to help predict where this is going, up to 200,000 by October, is the principal driving force here that states have reopened and, arguably, too quickly?

WALENSKY: Well, I think the principal driving force is just watching the behaviors. We saw this plummet in diseases, in new infections, when everything was closed. And what we really didn't understand or know is how people would behave when things started to open.

And what we're seeing from footage, especially from the states where we see these cases rising, is that states are not opening gently. They're opening with lots of crowds, with lack of face masks, and people are gathering. And when that happens, you don't need too many infections for cases to soar.

SCIUTTO: There is some concern now, and we've talked about a second wave for some time, but that that second wave, rather than November, as it's been discussed, might be earlier, as soon as September, and happen at the same time as the regular seasonal flu, I wonder what your view is on that, what's behind that, how concerned should people be that this may come earlier than they expected?

WALENSKY: Yes, I think the concern is great. I think we had really hoped that we could ride out the summer with people distancing, with people being outside, with people wearing face masks, using hand hygiene, and that we wouldn't have a lot of infections coming into the fall just at the same time as we generally start seeing flu infections, or certainly, we're starting to vaccinate for flu. What I think folks don't really realize is our hospitals are really busy in flu season. our ICUs are full with people with influenza. And so, if we have a coincident peak of both influenza and COVID, our hospitals are going to be in even more trouble than they were in this past spring.

So, one of the things I think we really need to hammer home is the need for the flu vaccine in the fall, because the more cases of flu we can prevent, we won't be able to prevent COVID by the fall, the more cases of flu we can prevent, the more likely we'll have the hospital capacity to take care of the COVID cases as they come in.

SCIUTTO: Hospital capacity, of course, a major driver. I'm a parent. I know many people are watching at home right now. The hope is that schools, many or most schools will be able to reopen in August- September. Does this new projection give you pause about that?

WALENSKY: Right. I know there are a lot of people working on how we're both going to open higher education as well as the grade schools in the fall. And, yes, it does give me pause. I really think, you know, when you see the footage of people not wearing face masks, not doing their best to prevent infections, it makes you really worry about how we're going to gather small children together.

What I want to remind people is that children do quite well. We are not necessarily trying to protect the children from one another because their bad outcomes -- and yes, they do have some -- but their bad outcomes tend to be the rare ones. The problem is we don't understand how they can potentially serve as vectors to bring disease home to parents, to elderly, to people with immunocompromising diseases, to people with lung diseases. And so, I think -- and we do know that this disease can gather in families.

So, I think that we are really going to have to rethink what this is going to look like, especially when cases are starting to be on the rise just as people are thinking about getting back to school.

[07:20:00]

SCIUTTO: Yes.

Okay, hydroxychloroquine, normally an anti-malarial drug, one touted repeatedly by the president, and he revealed that he apparently took it as a prophylactic, as a preventive measure. Now, the FDA has rescinded its recommendation of use here.

I mean, there had already been data showing that there wasn't much, if any, positive effect of this. Now the FDA rescinding approval, why, how important is that and what does it say about the sitting president who so aggressively advertised this, really, as a treatment?

WALENSKY: Right, this is really key. So, what I think I emphasize is that the gold standard in how we care for patients, how we understand science is through a randomized clinical trial. That has long been the gold standard. We had been desperate early on because people were doing so poorly with this disease, to have something to treat them with.

Hydroxychloroquine had a very early signal in the lab in a handful of patients in very small studies, and we latched onto it as something that we were hopeful could be used.

What's evolved over the last several months is large observational cohorts, some larger, although not large clinical trials as of yet, some prevention trials, a single prevention trial that was published a few weeks ago on hydroxychloroquine. And none of those have really panned out to demonstrate efficacy.

And in fact, importantly, they have shown some bad side effects, some dysrhythmias, abnormal heart rhythms that occur when taking it, which we knew was a side effect of hydroxychloroquine to start.

So, I think that the data are now really emerging that this is not what we had hoped it would be. Last week, the NIH panel of scientists withdrew their recommendation for using hydroxychloroquine, and I believe that was some of the motivation for why the FDA withdrew their EUA.

SCIUTTO: Dr. Rochelle Walensky, new CNN Medical Analyst, thanks so much for joining us.

WALENSKY: Thanks for having me. Take care.

CAMEROTA: All right. Jim, let's look internationally, because worldwide, the number of coronavirus cases has now passed 8 million.

In China, officials are racing to control a new outbreak that's believed to have spread much more widely than just the food market where it started.

CNN has reporters all around the world working these stories for you.

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STEVEN JIANG, CNN SENIOR PRODUCER: I'm Steven Jiang in Beijing, where the number of newly confirmed coronavirus cases has now reached 106 since last Thursday. Almost all of them linked to this now closed, huge wholesale food market.

The authorities here are conducting extensive contact tracing and mass testing for anyone who had visited this market since May 30th. It's a daunting task though. According to state media, they have already tracked down some 200,000 people in this category.

The worry now is, if the city is going to see a spike of new cases in the coming days and how many of the infected people may have already left town.

SHASTA DARLINGTON, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I'm Shasta Darlington in Sao Paulo. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro spoke to his Russian counterpart on Monday. He and Vladimir Putin say they discussed matters to slow the spread and impact of COVID-19 as well as broader bilateral cooperation. Brazil surpassed Russia last month as the country with the second highest number of cases, behind the United States. Brazil reported 20,000 new coronavirus cases on Monday.

ANNA COREN, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I'm Anna Coren in Hong Kong. After more than three weeks of no new cases of COVID-19 in New Zealand, with authorities believing the country had managed to eliminate the virus, the Ministry of Health today announced two new cases. They are both women who had traveled from the U.K. via Australia, allowed in on compassionate grounds to visit a dying relative.

It's a major blow for the country that has aggressively tackled the virus. Only last week, New Zealand lifted almost all domestic coronavirus restrictions. It's also a cautionary tale on the challenges countries are facing as they try to reopen in the midst of a pandemic still spreading around the world.

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I'm Atika Shubert in Mallorca, Spain. Schools here now have the option to reopen to students if they meet certain coronavirus safety standards. At one school that we visited, that meant temperature checks at the school gates and classes of 15 students or less with desks at least two meters apart. Masks were mandatory in the hallways, and students had to wash their hands in alcohol solution before and after each class.

One fourth grader told me the hardest part about coming back to school now was not being able to hug your friends.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CAMEROTA: Our thanks to our correspondents.

And now, we want to remember some of the more than 116,000 Americans lost to coronavirus.

67-year-old Esperanza Ugalde of North Aurora, Illinois, was the center of her family.

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Ugalde's daughter says her mom immigrated from Mexico in the '80s, loved music and dancing and was a fixture at school events, bringing generations together.

Glovis Foster was a flight medic for San Juan County, New Mexico, for more than 20 years and served in the military before that. First responders honored him with a procession that traveled more than 180 miles from Albuquerque to Farmington.

35-year-old Linika Stroger (ph) overcame a learning disability to earn two masters degrees. She worked in the DNA lab at Chicago's Field Museum. Colleagues say she had a passion for science, research, teaching and mentoring.

And overnight, Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar announced that her father, Nur Omar Muhammad, died from coronavirus. She says no words can describe what he meant to me and all who knew him. We'll be right back.

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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TOMIKA MILLER, RAYSHARD BROOKS' WIDOW: They feel sorry for what they've taken away. That's why I want to know.

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