When unrest broke out in Ferguson, Mo. in August, after municipal police officer Darren Wilson repeatedly shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) staked out ground that made Democrats nervous. Unlike many of his colleagues, Sen. Paul stuck his neck out to denounce police abuses and a system of law enforcement that unjustly punishes and brutalizes those it deems to have the wrong color skin.
“Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention,” he wrote in a TIME op-ed, just days after Wilson viciously shot and killed Brown. “Our prisons are full of black and brown men and women who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent mistakes in their youth.”
Compare that to Missouri’s own Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), was tone-deaf, callous, and victim-blaming when he said that “Brown’s memory, his family, and his community are not well-served by more violence.” Paul’s message was clear. Unlike many in his caucus, the likely 2016 Presidential candidate recognized that humanity existed beyond the confines of geriatric White America.
But in ninety seconds on Wednesday, Paul’s post-Ferguson luster quickly faded, as the movement against systemic racism and police brutality continues to grow. In the afternoon, it was announced that New York City policy officer Daniel Pantaleo would not be indicted for fatally choking a 43 year-old black man and father of six named Eric Garner.
The decision rocked the country. The incident had been filmed. Multiple officers took part in physically restraining Garner. The victim repeatedly cried out “I can’t breathe.” The NYPD had banned the use of chokeholds. And a medical examiner had ruled that Garner’s death was a homicide. Despite the facts, Garner’s killer walked free–his badge and race, it seemed, served as a get out-of-jail free card. Protests erupted around the country.
But, when asked by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews about the decision, and specifically about how to “bridge the gap between white and black” Paul could only find it within himself to utter a patently absurd statement about the fact that officers initially approached Garner because he was selling loose cigarettes:
“I think there’s something bigger than the individual circumstances. Obviously, the individual circumstances are important. But I think it is also important to know that some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes so that driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive. But then some politician also had to direct the police to say, ‘hey we want you arresting people for selling a loose cigarette.’ And for someone to die over breaking that law, there really is no excuse for it. But I do blame the politicians. We put our police in a difficult situation with bad laws.”
The statement wouldn’t seem out of place written on a sheet of paper, held by a man in a fedora, and posted on Reddit, via selfie, under “r/goldstandard.” It is not, however, going to broaden his appeal. Despite his recent overtures, it isn’t surprising that Sen. Paul made these comments, given his history of rants against the Civil Rights Act — past pronouncements that probably would have been more easily overlooked if he stayed on point about racist policing.
Whatever one thinks about New York City’s tobacco regulations, they are not “bigger than the individual circumstances.” Recent high profile victims of police in New York City and around the country who will not live to appear on a CATO panel–Brown, Garner, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Ramarley Graham, and Sean Bell to name a few–all share traits that have nothing to do with offending nanny state sensibilities.
Nor are laws more deserving of scrutiny–drug laws–“bigger than the individual circumstances.” A Brookings study released in September found that black Americans are 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for dealing, and 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for possession, despite the fact that white teenagers and young adults are about 32 percent more likely to sell drugs. Another 2011 study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that whites are almost twice as likely to do drugs than blacks.
It is likely that Paul is softening his criticism of police brutality due to grumbles from the right. On Tuesday, noted racist Ben Shapiro wrote on Breitbart.com that Paul’s “anti-police Ferguson pandering will bite him in 2016.” But if Sen. Paul ignores numbers produced by serious studies of our criminal justice system, he can forget about boosting his own approval ratings outside of the GOP echo chamber.
