Last Thursday, presidential hopeful Ben Carson admitted to a forum at Allen University, a historically black college, that he had only heard about one unarmed black victim of police violence, Tamir Rice. This deficiency apparently colors his entire view of police brutality, as Carson told the crowd that he is “still waiting for the evidence,” that police bias exists in killing black men and women. ThinkProgress reports:
“I’m not aware of a lot of cases where a police officer comes up to someone like you and says ‘Hey, I don’t like you. I’m going to shoot you,’” he said to moderator Jeff Johnson from Black Entertainment Television. “I’m still waiting for the evidence.”
Johnson quickly responded: “I’ll show you the Tamir Rice tape,” to loud applause from the black audience.
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When presented with evidence of these biases, Carson appeared to change his tone, telling ThinkProgress that police who kill unarmed black men should be swiftly brought to justice. But he could not name any policies he’d promote as president to change the systematic violence inflicted by police against black people.
This is a rare moment of honesty for the Carson campaign, which has been beleaguered by fact-checkers recently. Carson, when confronted with real cases of police violence against unarmed black citizens, actually took the revelation in stride and did not deny the possibility of racial injustice, although he still kept to the “rogue cops” narrative as opposed to any indictment of the system at large.
However, Carson still could not nail down any specific useful policies to help. According to ThinkProgress:
When pressed by a reporter about what policies he’d push to prevent the recurrence of police violence, whether it’s body cameras or improved police training, he refused to name concrete proposals.
“One policy that I would encourage is whenever an instance like this happens, the very fact that I’ve only heard about one of them but there’s a whole bunch of them you’re saying, that’s wrong,” he said. “We should all know about this and they should be made into a big deal, not only for the community but for the police department.”
In the year since Tamir Rice’s death, several other cases of police violence against unarmed black citizens have become headlines, including recent coverage of Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis after Jamar Clark was killed by police. Although Carson’s initial refusal to acknowledge police violence against black citizens is indicative of an almost unfathomable lack of awareness after so many high profile cases, perhaps Carson can spin useful policy ideas now that he has been made aware.