Ben Carson Says He Ran From The Cops ‘Back In The Day Before They Would Shoot You’

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Image Via Gage Skidmore for Flickr

Speaking at the University of New Hampshire on Wednesday, 2016 GOP Presidential candidate Ben Carson joked that he would often run from the police as a child, “back in the day before they would shoot you.”

Carson said the police would sometimes chase him for throwing rocks at cars:

“Everybody did it.”

Police, Carson recalled, would chase rock throwers through a field until the kids hopped over a fence:

“They had no idea how adept we were at getting over those fences. I mean full speed ahead, never break stride, leap high into the fence. Allow the momentum of your feet to swing you over the top, drop down on the other side all in one motion. And laugh at them because they couldn’t do that.”

Then Dr. Carson added this telling comment:

“Now, that was back in the day before they would shoot you, and then uh…”

Perhaps realizing that he had just said exactly what the Black Lives Matter movement has been talking about ever since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Carson then backtracked and said:

“I’m just kidding they wouldn’t do that.”

If they wouldn’t do it, then why did you say it? It seems especially hypocritical to hear Ben Carson talk like this when you consider some of the things he has said in the past about African-Americans and the police. Just last month the good doctor, appearing in Ferguson, Missouri, proclaimed that he had been raised to respect police officers and “never had any problems.”

Sounds to me like Ben Carson is trying to have it both ways: He wants to make believe there is no racial component to the all-too-frequent shootings of young black men by the police, and yet he also wants to tell an audience in New Hampshire that he once ran from the cops back before they would shoot you in the back. Which one is the truth, Dr. Carson? Or do you even know?

Featured image by Gage Skidmore for Flickr available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.