Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson said “I don’t know how anybody can say whether it was a rush to judgment or not” regarding the charges brought against six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray on Thursday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel.
“Without being able to see the same evidence that Ms. Mosby saw, I don’t know how anybody can say whether it was a rush to judgment or not. Obviously, we need to be exposed to the same kind of data, but it certainly did quiet things down. And the fact of the matter is, there is a legal process where the information will be hopefully made public and people will be able to see what happened. I personally, as a physician, think that there was a severe injury incurred during the arrest. I don’t think it was done purposely” Carson stated.
He continued, “I think during the arrest, you can easily, particularly a heavy strong individual, put one’s knee down on the base of a person’s neck and cause instability. And if they’re rattling around in a truck, none of that, obviously, was done on purpose, but it was still done and needs to be dealt with.”
Earlier, Carson said, “my feeling is that if they will continue to be transparent — or maybe I should say, start to be transparent with what’s going on, including releasing the findings and then explaining things to people, — over a period of time rather than letting there be just a sudden explosion at some point, i think that would make a big difference.”
When asked about relations between police and the community, he stated, “I think the problem with police in the community stems from the fact that we don’t introduce the police into the community at the right time. A lot of times the first encounter with police is a hostile one. They need to be embedded in the community, and they need to be people that are known.”
Carson also addressed the issue of poverty, arguing “clearly, the Great Society programs, the War on Poverty, has not been helpful. With the trillions and trillions of dollars that are being spent. And I don’t want to spend a lot of time demonizing anybody who did it, they may have had good intentions, but it’s clear to anybody that it hasn’t worked. So, we should be talking about what do we do to get people to move up and out of dependency. And I think what we have to do is recognize that it’s relationships, rather than throwing money that works. There are many examples around the country of programs, that generally are started by the private sector…who get involved with their fellow human beings, and those are the things that actually get people out of poverty.” And “my mother refused to be a victim, and she wouldn’t let us be victims, and she didn’t make excuses, and she wouldn’t let us make excuses. And that was a big part of it. It’s one of the things that we talked about today, was the importance of going back to values and principles that used to make the community strong, that used to allow them to get through some of the hardships. A lot of that’s been abandoned. But also recognize that a lot of traditional families have been broken, and a lot of them are broken by government programs that actually incentivize people to not have complete families.”
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