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DOJ to Release Report on Racial Bias by Baltimore Police; Clinton Campaign Focusing on Northern Virginia; U.S. Women's Gymnastics Team Crushes Competition; Amusement Park Safety Under Scrutiny. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired August 10, 2016 - 06:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:30:15] CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Let's take you to Ferguson, Missouri. A scary moment for protesters gathered there in Ferguson. They were there to mark two years since the police shooting death of Michael Brown.

A man stepped into the middle of the street and was hit by a car. We're not going to show it because it was graphic, obviously. But it was believed to be an accident. The driver who hit him is cooperating.

Now, witnesses heard shots fired shortly after the crash. It is unknown if the incidents are connected. Brown's death set off a series of violent protests in Ferguson, as you remember. But multiple investigations ended with officials saying that the actions in that case were justified.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: In just a few hours, the Justice Department will release a blistering indictment of the Baltimore Police Department. They will cite racial bias by officers, including unlawful stops and excessive force. CNN's Jean Casarez is live for us in Baltimore.

What are we expecting from this report, Jean?

JEAN CASAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's 163 pages. It's voluminous. But the report states there is reasonable cause that the Baltimore Police Department exhibited conduct and exhibits unconstitutional and violates federal law toward the community of Baltimore, especially toward the African-American community.

Now, I really think there are probably four headings of this very large report, and they are as follow. Unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests, discriminates against African-Americans, excessive use of force, and retaliating against people exercising their First Amendment rights.

Now, the report talks about that the real cause of this is a lack of policing of the police, that they are not police, that there is not accessibility to training or understanding of the proper procedures, but there's also an aura of personality responsibility saying in regard to discriminating again African-Americans, they do not do things the way they do to the white community. Now, they cite specific examples.

Here's one. An African-American man in his mid-50s, he was stopped as a pedestrian more than 30 times, but he actually was never arrested or cited, and it was unconstitutional behavior toward him. So, today at 10:30, this is where, at the Baltimore city hall, the Department of Justice will announce their findings in a live press conference -- Chris.

CUOMO: All right, Jean. Thank you very much. We'll stay on that. Appreciate the reporting.

Up next, we're going to take a closer look at one of the key battleground states, Virginia. Why? Well, it's the home of Hillary Clinton's running mate Tim Kaine. Question is, this is a red state in all likelihood. Will Tim Kaine be able to turn it blue? We're going to look at that battle, next.

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CUOMO: All right. This election is going to be about battleground states probably more than any other in recent history. We're going a series on it to show you what may matter most in November. Republican Donald Trump is going to campaign in Virginia today. Why? Well, it's the home state of the Democratic VP nominee Tim Kaine. It is a state that is often red but could go blue.

President Obama turned that state blue for the first time since '64. He repeated it in 2012. Hillary Clinton needs to do that now to win.

CNN's Athena Jones is live in Alexandria, Virginia, with more.

Good morning.

ATHENA JONES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Chris. That's right.

Hillary Clinton wants to keep Virginia blue. Two polls in early July had her lead in this state in the high single digits, but there hasn't been much reliable polling since the party convention. So, we'll have to wait and see new numbers to see where the race stands. What we do know is that both campaigns are fighting hard for this battleground state's 13 electoral votes.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JONES (voice-over): The battle for Virginia is being waged by volunteers like these.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are you planning to support Hillary come November?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, yes.

JONES: Working to identify and recruit supporters to help turn out the vote in this swing state. HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Thank you, Northern

Virginia!

JONES: And with three months to go until Election Day, neither side is taking anything for granted.

GARREN SHIPLEY, COMMUNICATIONS DIR., VIRGINIA RNC: Virginia is absolutely critical. The road to the White House runs through the commonwealth, and we're committed to making that happen for our Republican nominee.

SUSAN SWECKER, CHAIRWOMAN, VIRGINIA DEM. PARTY: It's a very competitive state, and we're going to do everything we can to win this one for Clinton/Kaine.

JONES: The Clinton team has had staff here since April and has 28 field offices with opening this month. Much of their focus will be on turning out voters in northern Virginia counties close to D.C., an area with a large college educated population that has grown more diverse in recent years.

DR. JEREMY MAYER, SCHAR SCHOOL OF POLICY AND GOVERNMENT, GMU: Loudoun County is a huge battleground. It's a very large, second only to Fairfax, and there's a lot of swing voters there, a lot of people who can be persuaded.

JONES: Once reliably Republican, Loudoun County voted twice for President Obama in 2008 --

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It is good to be back in Virginia.

JONES: -- and 2012.

OBAMA: How's it going, Leesburg?

JONES: Helping him stop a decades long Republican wining streak dating back to 1968. Now, it's a top target for both Clinton and Trump.

TRUMP: We have to get everybody out. Loudoun County is so important.

JONES: The real estate mogul has already won over some Loudoun County voters.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He basically says things like it is. I feel more that you can trust him more than Hillary.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's mainly a never Hillary vote.

REPORTER: Really?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. Because I think she has way too much baggage to be president of the United States.

JONES: But Clinton supporters here are just as committed. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think competency is important. And she clearly

has a lot of experience and seems to know what she's doing.

[06:40:02] UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She's the best candidate for the job. I've been a supporter of hers for a long time. In this particular case, I think that she is certainly the better choice.

JONES: And the Clinton campaign hopes tapping former governor and current Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her number two will help her in the state.

SEN. TIM KAINE (D-VA), VICE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Do you want a trash talker president or our bridge builder president?

JONES: The Clinton team and its allies has spent nearly $5 million on TV ads in Virginia, while the National Rifle Association has spent just over $260,000 on behalf of Trump. The Trump campaign hasn't spent any money on the air waves, but that doesn't mean Republicans aren't fighting hard to win here.

SHIPLEY: We're working right now with our volunteers to identify as many Republicans as we can and then as we move forward in the campaign, that will become persuasion, motivation to get out the vote.

JONES: Trump's campaign is leaning heavily on the Republican National Committee for its get out the vote efforts. The RNC has been on the ground here since the beginning of 2015.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My name is Jacob. I'm with the Trump campaign.

JONES: They now have some 40 paid staffers working with hundreds of volunteers to woo voters, particularly in Southwest Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley, and Southside Virginia look the North Carolina border. And they're not conceding Loudoun County, where recent college graduate Cameron Saadi (ph) is hoping the debates will help him make up his mind.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'll be watching them to see how the candidates distinguish themselves from each other.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

JONES: Now, given recent history, Hillary Clinton may have the edge here, but RNC teams are taking a page from the Obama campaign playbook. They've divided the state into more than a hundred neighborhood areas that they're organizing from the ground up. That means that this year, the person knocking on the doors of potential GOP voters is more likely to be a friend or a neighbor rather than a stranger dispatched from some distant GOP headquarters.

It's more persuasive and something the RNC folks say the Obama teams did well here -- Brianna.

KEILAR: We'll see if that works. Athena Jones in Alexandria, Virginia -- thank you so much for that report.

They are America's new golden girls. Young, fierce, and crushing it at the Rio Olympics. Is this the best U.S. gymnastics squad ever?

We have Shannon Miller, the most decorated American gymnast ever, joining us next.

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[06:46:25] KEILAR: Team USA's women's gymnastics team has done it again. He's very into this, right?

So, the final five as we learned, that's what they're called, they won team gold for America. They dominated Russia. They got silver, of course.

And this was just a staggering --

CUOMO: Beat them by eight points. That's huge. It's like five touchdowns.

KEILAR: This is a sport where it's fractions of points, right? So, that's gigantic.

Joining us know is the most decorated gymnast in American history. U.S. Olympic gold medalist Shannon Miller joining us again today.

And, Shannon, you were there. You were watching this. I know you wouldn't have missed it, former member of the Magnificent Seven, watching the Final Five. This was staggering, though. They had the highest total score on each apparatus.

SHANNON MILLER, U.S. GOLD MEDALIST IN GYMNASTICS: It's amazing. This team, they've been hyped so much. They're the next dream team, they're the best ever. They walked into that arena and showed it's absolutely accurate. They really just took command of the competition.

And they did it in a way that was so nice for the audience. In the arena, you felt like they were giving this wonderful exhibition of what true gymnastics can look like at the absolute top of the game.

CUOMO: Final Five. We finally figure out the name of the team. What's the significance behind it?

MILLER: So this is the -- the final five talks about basically this is the last time we'll have a five-member team at the Olympic Games. So in 2020, it'll go down to a four-member team. That's kind of where the Final Five came from.

CUOMO: Also, it's the last games for Marta Karolyi. It has lot of significance. It's sort of a sea change even for American gymnastics.

MILLER: It is. And Marta Karolyi, back around 2000, she really took hold of the team as the team coordinator and kind of evolved it into a more centralized system where these athletes train a bit more together rather than we did kind of individually back in my day.

The centralized system is working. It's been great for the young athletes coming up. It's really built this feeder system, so that we're seeing the fruits of that labor now here in 2016. These women are just absolutely dominant. And it looks like there's really no stopping them for years to come.

CUOMO: So, Brianna's been telling me about this signature pass that we saw last night.

KEILAR: The Biles.

CUOMO: The Biles that nailed it.

We'll show it. Let's show it to people. You tell us, Shannon, what makes this so special?

MILLER: Well, I think number one, the power. You watch Simone Biles on floor, and she makes it look so easy. Oh, that's a nice skill.

But the power involved in getting two flips around and a half twist at the end and sticking a landing blindly, it's incredible the amount of difficulty, grace, composure, all that goes into sticking this skill. She makes it look so easy.

KEILAR: It's really unbelievable.

CUOMO: Just the bounce up off the butt I could never imagine.

KEILAR: I loved her ending. I know she says, Simone says the guys, her guy friends in gymnastics, they try to land that and they can't. The pass where she does the half twist, it's called a blind landing. How difficult is that, Shannon?

MILLER: It's really difficult because you're coming around to the floor, and you don't get to see the floor and place your feet. You have to kind of guess to some degree. You have to feel your way along and feel where that landing is going to be. So your timing has to be absolutely spot on. You have to know where you are in the air at all times and have the exact power, the exact rotation that you need to stick that landing. She seems to do it every time out.

[06:50:00] CUOMO: You know, you remember from your experience sometimes the U.S., people try to mitigate, people try to reduce the significance of our wins, saying, oh, it's such a big country, there's so much great athleticism here. But isn't gymnastics about the grind and the work and even something like that, a blind landing, where that's just practice and practice and practice. Otherwise, who knows what happens when you go out.

MILLER: Absolutely. And I always say, you know, when you're out here and you're watching these athletes, the medal, the gold medal, it's not won on the day of competition. It's won with the years of hard work and dedication that leads up to the competition.

All of that hard work you did before you even step out on the floor. That's what these girls have done. So when they walked into the arena, there was less anxiety, there was less pressure. Not that they didn't feel some pressure to do well, but they knew they had done their job every single day leading up to the competition.

I think internationally, that's so respected. We respect that with other teams. They respect that with us. Because we know how hard we all worked to get to that point.

KEILAR: Shannon, tell us what you've been up to. It's been -- I can't believe it. It's been 20 years since the '96 Olympics. Seems like it was just a few years ago. I know you've been staying very busy there in Rio.

MILLER: Absolutely. I'm excited to be here in Rio. I'm here with Hershey's as an ambassador for Hershey's, which is awesome. Today is actually National S'mores Day in the U.S. So, we're bringing a little bit of that to Rio and so we're going to have a lot of fun.

KEILAR: Where are our s'mores?

CUOMO: Made some at the house last night. Didn't even know it.

KEILAR: That gives me an excuse.

MILLER: You got a head start.

KEILAR: Thank you. All right, Shannon. Thank you so much as always for joining us. What a great night. We're so happy to have you with us.

MILLER: Thank you.

KEILAR: And we're going to be talking about amusement park safety ahead. This was really pushed into the national spotlight after the death of this little boy, 10-year-old Caleb Schwab, who died on a giant water slide. Who's in charge of making sure rides are as safe as they are thrilling? We'll have the answer for you, and it may surprise you.

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[06:55:40] KEILAR: A Kansas City water park reopens this morning, three days after a 10-year-old boy was killed on a water slide nearly 170 feet tall. That slide will actually remain closed indefinitely, we've learned. In Tennessee, a mechanical failure is blamed for a Ferris wheel accident that left three girls falling more than 40 feet to the ground.

CNN's Rene Marsh is live for us in Washington with more on this -- Rene.

RENE MARSH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brianna, it's a patchwork of oversight. Safety advocates say it's creating a dangerous loophole. This morning, a child is in intensive care in Johnson City, Tennessee. And a county fair has been forced to shut down all of its rides. It's the second amusement park accident in just two days.

The concern now, there is no set standard for safety regulations at these parks. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DISPATCH: I've got three kids that have fell from the Ferris wheel. Three kids.

MARSH (voice-over): Monday, three girls fell about 45 feet from an amusement park ride in Tennessee, one of them severely injured.

DETECTIVE CPT. TIM DAVIS, GREENVILLE POLICE: The inspectors have found there is a mechanical issue with this ride behind me and that they believe led to the incident at hand.

MARSH: And just one day earlier, 10-year-old Caleb Schwab died from a neck injury after riding this 168-foot-tall water slide in Kansas City, Kansas, a foot taller than Niagara Falls. It's dubbed the world's largest water slide.

DEBORAH HERSMAN, PRESIDENT & CEO, NATOINAL SAFETY COUNCIL: What we do know about water parks is there is very little federal oversight or regulations. They're not required to report their injuries. And that much of this is handled at the state and local level.

MARSH: There are more than 400 amusement parks in the United States, attracting more than 330 million visitors per year. No federal agency is responsible for oversight. It's up to the states to regulate, and some are more strict than others.

But the trade group that represents amusement parks tells CNN, quote, "Serious incidents are extremely rare."

The most recent data from 2014 shows of the millions of visitors to amusement parks in the U.S., there were more than 1,100 reported injuries. But that number does not account for water parks or traveling parks like the Ferris wheel incident in Tennessee. That data is harder to come by.

It also doesn't account for close calls like this. A Texas father forced to hold his 6-year-old son mid-ride after the safety restraint came loose.

And fatal incidents like the woman who fell out of a roller coaster car and plummeted to her death at Six Flags over Texas in 2013.

CARMEN BROWN, WITNESS: She goes up like this and then when it drops to com, down, that's when it released and she just tumbled.

MARSH: All raise questions about why there isn't one standard to ensure the millions of riders are safe.

HERSMAN: They're expecting to have a safe ride. We need to make sure that all of the work on the design, maintenance, and oversight and inspection is done so that there is a safe ride for everyone.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MARSH: Well, there is some federal oversight for temporary fairs and carnivals, but 35 years ago, legislation was revised preventing the federal government from regulating amusement parks and water parks.

We do know Senator Ed Markey blames that on lobbying pressure from the amusement park industry. He's been trying since 1999 to restore that federal oversight, but it hasn't happened yet. Back to you guys.

KEILAR: So important they're held accountable. We're actually getting some hints, Rene, when we talk to a witness of that accident in Kansas City.

Rene Marsh for us in Washington -- thank you.

We are following a whole lot of news. Let's get to it.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Hillary wants to abolish the Second Amendment. Nothing you can do, folks. Although, the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.

HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That was more than a speed bump.

GOV. MIKE PENCE (R-IN), VICE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Donald Trump is urging people manner consistent with their convictions.

REP. PAUL RYAN (R-WI), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: That stuff sells, but it doesn't stick.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Red, white, blue, and gold at the Rio Olympics.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The world's most decorated Olympian clinching two victories.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Katie Ledecky winning her second gold medal in Rio.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is the greatest gymnastics team in history.