BALTIMORE (CBSDC/AP) — A Baltimore city councilman slammed those who have called rioters “thugs,” including President Barack Obama, saying they might as well have called them “n*******.”

Carl Stokes made the comments during an interview with CNN Tuesday afternoon after Erin Burnett asked him if thugs was the right word to call the violent protesters.

“No, of course it’s not the right word to call our children thugs. These are children who have been set aside, marginalized, who have not been engaged by us. No, we don’t have to call them thugs,” he said.

Stokes continued: “So calling them thugs, just call them n*******, just call them n******. No, we don’t have to call them by names such as that. We don’t have to do that. That is exactly what we have set them to. … You wouldn’t call your child a thug if they should do something that would not be what you would expect them to do.”

Stokes also said during his interview with CNN that the real residents of Baltimore are taking back their city.

“I know that was a terrible scene we saw [Monday] night and a little bit on Saturday, but the greater majority – a few hundred people versus hundreds of thousands of residents in Baltimore city – have come out of their homes and said, ‘This is Baltimore. This is our Baltimore,’” he said. “And they’re showing just who we are and why we’re standing up for justice. Not only for Freddie Gray, but all of the Freddie Grays who have been killed and brutalized in Baltimore.”

Obama showed no sympathy for rioters during a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Tuesday, saying those who stole from businesses and burned buildings and cars should be treated as criminals. Obama said they distracted from days of peaceful protests focused on legitimate concerns “over the possibility that our laws were not applied evenly in the case of Mr. Gray and that accountability needs to exist.”

“There’s no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday,” Obama said. “It is counterproductive. When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they’re not protesting, they’re not making a statement, they’re stealing.”

But he also criticized a society that doesn’t do enough to uplift poor minority communities. He said the solution to deep-seeded problems that spur violence include early education, criminal justice reform and job training, while suggesting that kind of a response is out of reach with a Republican Congress. “I’m under no illusion that out of this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities,” Obama said.

“It’s too easy to ignore those problems or to treat them just as a law-and-order issue as opposed to a broader social issue,” Obama said.

Gray is the latest black man to die at the hands of police, prompting protests and calls for criminal justice reform. Some have criticized America’s first black president for not speaking out forcefully enough as he tries to avoid criticism of law enforcement, and he responded by calling the deaths “a slow-rolling crisis.”

“We have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions. It comes up, it seems like, once a week now,” Obama said. He said although such cases aren’t unprecedented, there’s new awareness as a result of cameras and social media. “We shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.”

Gray died of a spinal cord injury after being arrested.

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