Even George W. Bush doesn’t get how the cop who killed Eric Garner escaped being charged with a crime.
“You know, the verdict was hard to understand,” the former President said in an interview with CNN’s Candy Crowley that aired Friday.
Bush admitted he has not “seen all the details” of the controversial case that has many New Yorkers up in arms after a Staten Island grand jury chose to not indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo.
“But it’s sad that race continues to play such an emotional, divisive part of life,” he said.
Still, the Republican said, the U.S. has come a long way since the 1970’s when there were “race riots with cities being burned.”
Bush said he recently had dinner with his former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is black, and they talked about the uproar in Ferguson, Mo., after the white police officer who killed 18-year-old Michael Brown was not indicted by a local grand jury.
“We Talked about this subject, and yeah — she just said, you gotta understand that there are a lot of black folks that are incredibly, more and more, distrusting of law enforcement,” Bush said. “Which is a shame, because law enforcement’s job is to protect everybody.
