Rand Paul: ‘White kids don’t get the same justice’

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky took his pitch for criminal justice reform on Tuesday to Baltimore, where he once again mentioned Kalief Browder, a New York man who recently committed suicide after having spent three years at Rikers without being convicted of a crime.

“I’ve been telling this story for about a year and a half, two years now,” Mr. Paul said at a Baltimore County GOP dinner in Maryland, Bloomberg Politics reported. “It makes me sad. 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. He was a 16-year-old teenager from the Bronx. He was arrested, accused of a crime and sent to Rikers.”

“Are we going to let you be raped and murdered and pillaged before you’ve been convicted?” said Mr. Paul, a 2016 GOP presidential candidate. “He wasn’t even convicted! So when I see people angry and upset, I’m not here to excuse violence in the cities, but [when] I see people angry, I see where some of the anger is coming from.”

Speaking near the place where 25-year-old Freddie Gray had died after being taken into police custody weeks ago, Mr. Paul also touched on going to Ferguson, Missouri, where 18-year-old Michael Brown had been shot to death by police last summer.

“[T]his 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,” he said.

“The Democrats have utterly failed our inner cities, and utterly failed the poor,” Mr. Paul said. “Don’t let them tell us it wasn’t them. A lot of these policies came from Bill Clinton. In Ferguson, for every 100 black women, there are 60 black men. That’s because 40 are incarcerated. Am I saying they did nothing wrong and it’s all racism? No. 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.”

Mr. Paul also mentioned Richard Jewell, the suspect in the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, as an example of how bad policing could affect anyone.

“I’m not saying it’s racism,” he said. “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.”