Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson on Thursday said Baltimore’s state attorney who charged six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray was “sitting on a powder keg” and needed to act to “calm the situation down.”
The state’s attorney, Marilyn Mosby, has faced criticism from the Baltimore police union and other critics who believe she was too quick to file criminal charges against the police officers and was motivated by protests and rioting in Baltimore earlier that same week.
“Somebody did something inappropriate and therefore she understood — I believe — that she was sitting on a powder keg and needed to do something to calm the situation down,” Carson said Thursday on CNN’s “New Day.”
Carson said, though, that he doesn’t believe all six officers charged are in fact guilty of wrongdoing.
Carson’s comments came just as he prepared to head to Baltimore to meet with faith and community leaders in that city, which Carson called home for more than three decades.
Carson worked in Baltimore for 36 years, serving as director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University for 29 years.
He is the first Republican presidential candidate to visit the city since Gray’s death and the ensuing protests that renewed the conversation around race and policing.
Carson, who grew up poor in Detroit, also repeated his previous comments about Gray’s death and tensions between inner cities and the police.
He stressed that the solution to the frustration that he believes sparked the looting and violence in Baltimore is to “bring real hope back and do the kinds of things that actually allow people to be elevated out of dependent and dismal situations.”