Veteran Canadian reporter: I'm white and 'America's police now frighten me'

CBC Senior Washington Correspondent Neil Macdonald, who has 27 year with the network and 12 years in newspapers, reacted to the violence in Baltimore this week by revealing that "American's police now frighten me."

In a column for CBC on Thursday, Macdonald argued that police killings were "America's real state of emergency."

"I don't mind saying it: America's police now frighten me," Macdonald wrote, reflecting on the death of Freddie Gray and the recent riots in Baltimore.

"Their power and their impunity frighten me," he admitted. "And I'm a white, 58-year-old middle-class man. I can't imagine what I'd be feeling if I were a black or Latino kid in Baltimore."

Macdonald noted that liberals were "worrying about what triggered the rioting," while conservatives were "pointing out the shameful looting and the rocks and fire, telling us we should be grateful we have brave police to stand between us and anarchy."

"But the reality the modern surveillance society is providing us is impossible to ignore," the veteran reported lamented. "It used to be the cop's word against the perp's. Now it's the cop's word against clear video evidence, and the cop still usually prevails."

Macdonald predicted that the police who were responsible for the death of Freddie Gray would also not have to answer in a court of law.

And he pointed out that a study by the libertarian Cato Institute showed that there were 4,861 formal incidents of police misconduct that resulted in 247 civilian fatalities in 2010 alone.

"If just a fraction of those fatalities were criminal, then the inescapable conclusion is that more people have been murdered by police in America in the last 10 years than by terrorists," Macdonald wrote.