Ben Carson said something totally unhelpful about black deaths at the hands of police

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has criticised public discourse around violence and crime for focusing too heavily on race.

Talking about the case of Sandra Bland, a black woman who was found hanged in her Texas prison cell after she was arrested for a traffic violation in July 2015, on CBS's Face The Nation, Carson said:

We have a tendency to inject race into everything anytime that there are people of different races involved in a conflict.

Are there rotten police officers? Of course there are. Just like there are rotten doctors and rotten teachers and rotten journalists. But we don’t condemn the whole class for that.

The "Black Lives Matter" movement emerged last year after a series of high-profile police shootings of unarmed black men.

On Boxing Day a Chicago police officer responding to a domestic disturbance call accidentally shot and killed a 55-year-old black woman.

Bettie Jones was one of two victims killed by police.

The other victim, Quintonio Legrier, 19, was also black.