On Friday night, Tucker Carlson took on a writer over her piece that was published on Salon.com called “America is suffering from a plague of deadly, unaccountable and racist police violence.”

The Fox News host noted in his intro that this article was published just days after NYPD officer Miosotis Familia was assassinated.

He began by asking Celisa Calacal, the author of the original Alternet piece, how she drew the conclusion that all police as a group are “racist and violent.”

Calacal pushed back by clarifying she wasn’t calling the police racist, but was acknowledging the statistics that show minorities are killed disproportionately by the police.

Carlson brought up the crime rates in minority-populated communities being much higher, saying that “may be a factor” in her statistics and emphasizing how “complex” the subject is by sharing statistics of his own from a Harvard study that show that “the odds of a black suspect being killed by a black officer were consistently greater than those killed by white officers.”

“If a black suspect is more likely to be shot by a black cop, then what does that tell us about racism?” he asked.

“We have to look at the system and not the individual police officers that are killing these people,” she responded.

She then claimed that police officers are “taught to go for violence first” in their training.

“I don’t want to be mean,” Carlson told her, “but you’re maybe dodging the point a little bit.”

He said using the charge of racism without showing actual evidence of racism “makes people more fearful, makes them hate each other, makes our society way less happy and less trusting” and calling her charge a “big deal.”

Calacal reiterated her statistics about the victims of police shootings, but Carlson shot back.

“I just want you to open your mind up a little bit,” he said, “This isn’t college. And just like––look at the facts and then draw a conclusions from those and sometimes you reach a point when you’re like ‘I’m not exactly sure what’s going on, but it’s not as simple as my professors told me it was.’ That’s all I’m hoping you’ll conclude.”

Watch the clip above, via Fox News.

[image via screengrab]

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