In a video released ahead of a Sunday interview, former President George W. Bush told CNN host Candy Crowley that the decision not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the death of Eric Garner was “hard to understand.”
“When you saw what happened in the streets of New York in the video, what did you think?” asked Crowley, who hosts “State of the Union.”
“I thought ‘how sad.’ You know, the verdict was hard to understand,” he said. “I hadn’t seen all the details — but it’s sad that race continues to play such an emotional, divisive part of life.”
Bush told Crowley he recently had dinner with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and discussed the recent civil unrest in the aftermath of Ferguson and the Garner decision.
“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.”