During his Thursday interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley called the past week of tumult in Baltimore “a huge setback” for the city. The potential 2016 candidate added that while it’s been “one of our darkest days,”

“What do you say to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina who be looking at Baltimore these last couple of weeks and saying it’s not a dream, it’s a nightmare?” Tapper asked.

“It’s been a huge setback,” O’Malley said. “What I say and what I’ve been saying to my neighbors all around the city is that, look, we’re going to come back. This is a setback. It’s one of our darkest days.”

“The last time that I think our entire city was gripped by this sort of grief and sadness would have been probably about ten years ago when an entire family, mom and dad, five kids, were fire-bombed in their sleep, just for believing that we could make our city safer. For calling 911 about drug dealers,” he said.

“Progress rarely moves in a straight line, and sometimes we have setbacks, and very few of them have been as heartbreaking to all of us who have done so much over these years to make Baltimore a safer and better place than the scenes that we saw, that are now indelibly seared into our memories,” the former governor said. “They’ve been broadcast around the world, and we have to do better, not only as a city, we have to do better as a country.”