Marc Lamont Hill blasts ex-detective on CNN over police killings
theGRIO REPORT -
The death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray has set off scores of protests, debates and raised even more questions.
Tuesday night’s Outfront with Erin Burnett on CNN was no different. HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill and former New York city police detective Harry Houck joined Burnett’s show as panelists.
That’s when the fireworks started.
The two guests clashed over the ‘root cause’ of recent officer-involved killings across the nation.
Hill described the recent killings as a “trail of dead black people at the hands of law enforcement.” Houck disagreed. He said the catalyst for so many of the killings was “resisting arrest.”
Watch the heated debate between the two commentators below:
At one point Houck defended Baltimore police and authorities in their arrest of 25-year-old Freddie Gray:
It is a black neighborhood, high-crime neighborhood – what, are they going to go around looking for white guys to stop when there’s none there?
Hill countered, saying that a neighborhood’s makeup or statistics don’t excuse “abuse.”:
That presumes that somebody has to get beaten in a high-crime neighborhood. Even if everybody is black, you can still just not abuse people.
When Houck reiterated his point about “resisting arrest” contributing to the black men losing their lives, Hill finally said: “That’s absurd.”
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