Dr. Ben Carson and Reverend Jesse Jackson appeared together on Fox News Sunday to offer insight into Ferguson from differing perspectives. Jackson ran into a little trouble in Ferguson last week when protesters cornered Jesse Jackson at a McDonald’s in Ferguson, Missouri, trashing him for what they saw as profiteering over Michael Brown’s death, rather than actually being a leader.
“Hey, Jesse Jackson. How you doing? Are you here to support us?” one protester began, approaching Jackson’s vehicle and recording the interaction.
“You’ve been marching all day long? We haven’t seen you marching all day long,” he said. “Are you going to pay the bond of those brothers that’s been locked up?”
Dr. Ben Carson said that the issues in the black community run deeper than superficial police brutality, though there are certainly instances across America. However, he said the good police do in the black community far outnumbers such instances.
Carson said that race could be removed from this debate altogether, and the problems in the black community suggest something else is at play, such as economic status, education and cultural collapse.
Jackson dodged responding to statistics showing that homicide is the number one cause of death among black men ages 15- to 34-years old, and 91 percent of those homicides are black on black murders. Jackson made the claim that justice is served faster when it is black on white crime, rather than white on black crime.
Chris Wallace, host of Fox News Sunday, noted that only 3 out of the 53 police officers on the Ferguson Police force are black, yet 67 percent of the city’s population is black. Further, 86 percent of traffic stops targets blacks in Ferguson last year, according to a U.S. Census report conducted by the Missouri AG.
Carson said that we needed to get people involved in their communities not just in Ferguson, but around the country. He said that — while environments and other outside factors play a role — the one in charge of what ultimately happens to a person in their lives is themselves.
