Republican candidate Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said the story of a black teen who was arrested and sent to Rikers Island for three years, only to have his case dismissed after enduring beatings while behind bars, is just the latest example of how blacks are not being treated fairly by the system.
“Am I saying they did nothing wrong and it’s all racism? No,” Paul said in a recent campaign speech, according to Bloomberg. “What I am telling you is that white kids don’t get the same justice … the arrests in Baltimore are 15 to one black to white for marijuana arrests,” he said, citing studies that show marijuana is used a similar amount in white and black populations.
“I’m not saying it’s racism,” said Paul, who has previously cited federal programs that incentivize drug arrests and the relative ease of making those arrests in cities as two possible reasons. “Many officials are black, so it’s not racism. But something’s wrong with the war on drugs that we decide to lock people up for 5, 10, 15 years.”
Over the weekend, the black teen who was released, Kalief Browder, committed suicide after trying to kill himself six times after his release.
“It makes me sad,” Paul said, according to Bloomberg. “I thought about not telling the story again. But I think this young man’s memory should help us to try to change things. He died this weekend. He committed suicide. His name was Kalief Browder.”
Paul has made a point of calling for criminal justice reform as part of his presidential campaign, and has said Republicans need to do a better job of reaching out to voters they don’t usually try to attract. In March 2015, Paul brought up Browder’s story during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Committee when Paul spoke of the need for criminal justice reform, a message that is not part of the typical Republican stump speech.
But Paul’s Wednesday night retelling was different, marred as it was by Browder’s suicide. It was “more gruesome” than the story he usually told, Bloomberg reports, “because he was building to something.”
“Are we going to let you be raped and murdered and pillaged before you’ve been convicted? He wasn’t even convicted!” said Paul. “So when I see people angry and upset, I’m not here to excuse violence in the cities, but I see people angry. I see where some of the anger is coming from.”
Paul asked the GOP donors, officials, and voters who had gathered into an overflow room to hear him explain why so many African-Americans were angry. The ballroom Paul spoke in was not far from the Baltimore neighborhoods that were centers of violence and chaos after 25-year-old African-American Freddie Gray died in police custody six weeks earlier.
“I went to Ferguson,” said Paul. “I said, set up voter registration tables, and register everybody that’s unhappy to vote. There is a constructive way of doing this.”
“I didn’t grow up poor — I grew up middle class, or upper middle class,” he said. “This is me learning about how other people have to deal with life. And this young man, 16 years old, imagine how his classmates feel about American justice. Imagine how his parents feel. Until we’ve walked in someone else’s shoes, we shouldn’t say we can’t understand the anger of people.”
While Paul’s message of criminal justice reform is not always well-received by Republicans, the Baltimore crowd seemed to agree with Paul, Bloomberg reported, and “rejected the idea that more police or harsher laws were the way to prevent future uprisings.”
Former president Bill Clinton’s anti-drug and minimum sentencing policies have devastated black communities, Paul suggested, saying that Democrats have “utterly failed our inner cities, and utterly failed the poor.”
“In Ferguson, for every 100 black women, there are 60 black men. That’s because 40 are incarcerated,” said Paul, referencing a New York Times piece, titled “1.5 Million Missing Black Men.”
