Ben Carson on Sunday rejected the suggestion that race played any role in the death of 28-year-old Sandra Bland while she was in police custody, further accusing others of attempting to "inject race" into the situation.
Appearing on CBS' Face The Nation, the Republican presidential hopeful was asked if he agreed with Bernie Sanders, who had said earlier on the show that Bland would not have died "if she were a white woman," according to CBS.
Carson said that those issues should be explored, but cautioned against the "tendency to inject race into everything anytime that there are people of different races involved in a conflict." He added: "There's no question we need to be looking at some of the things going on in the justice department to make it more sensitive to people."
While Sanders said that the Bland case was about race, Carson said that policing problems are more often about class. "A lot of things that are class and economics are ascribed to race," he said. As an example, Carson mentioned the practice of jailing people who fail to pay excessive fines for minor traffic violations.
"That thing costs like a 170 bucks," said Carson, according to CNN. "They don't have any way of paying that. They ignore it, the next you know there's a warrant for their arrest, they lose their job. All we have to do is be a little sensitive and say you can pay this off at 5 dollars a week."
Carson acknowledged there are problems with police forces but warned against condemning the profession.
“Are there rotten police officers? Of course there are,” said Carson, The Hill reported. “Just like there are rotten doctors and rotten teachers and rotten journalists. But we don’t condemn the whole class for that.”
Sandra Bland was found dead in a Texas prison cell last July after being pulled over and arrested for allegedly failed to signal a lane change. A county medical examiner ruled her death a suicide three days later. A Texas grand jury indicted nobody in the case.
