Republicans Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul have offered strikingly divergent tones on the controversial cases of lethal police force recently employed against black Americans.



Speaking recently to the conservative NewsmaxTV, Huckabee forcefully defended police officer Darren Wilson, who fatally shot Michael Brown during an August altercation in Ferguson, Missouri, that has since roiled the nation. Wilson was cleared by a grand jury of any wrongdoing.

The former Arkansas governor and 2008 presidential candidate asserted that Brown put his life in danger by acting like a "thug."

" … It’s a tragedy that the young man got shot, but this is a young man who had just roughed up a store owner, just robbed a store, and now he’s going after a cop’s gun. And it’s a horrible thing that he was killed, but he could have avoided that, if he had behaved like something other than a thug."



On the other hand, Paul, the freshman senator from Kentucky, said he was "horrified" by the video of Eric Garner's death in New York City. Garner was put in a chokehold by a police officer in July after an altercation involving Garner's alleged illegal sale of cigarettes. Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who applied the hold that led to Garner's death, also was cleared by a grand jury.

Speaking at a Mississippi Republican Party event Monday, Paul said Pantaleo should lose his badge, according to The Clarion-Ledger.

"I'm not even sure that Garner had any individual cigarettes on him. Now he had probably been doing that … but he didn't deserve to die for that … While the grand jury has made its decision, whether or not a policeman who accidentally kills someone while stopping them from distributing cigarettes, that's probably a lack of discretion and you probably shouldn't have the power to be a policeman any more, at the very least."