There is optimism in the powerful symbolism of those who took the stage in Dallas Tuesday for a memorial service for the fallen officers, led by President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush.
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It is natural to look at last week’s horrific events and hope they are a turning point in our country’s tortured history of race relations and policing.
“I’m here to insist we are not as divided as we seem”, Obama said.
“Those of us who love Dallas and call it home have lost five members of the family”, he said.
“Whenever those of us who are concerned about fairness in the criminal justice system attack police officers, you are doing a disservice to the cause”, Obama said at a stop in Madrid.
Johnson attacked during a march protesting the police shootings last week of two black men in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and outside St. Paul, Minnesota. “We have too many bridges to build that we will cross together”, Rawlings said. In this audience, I see what’s possible. “I see the inadequacy of my own words”.
Bush, a Dallas resident, attended the memorial with his wife, Laura.
Obama called on the country to confront racism and at the mean time support the ordinary Americans.
Tuesday’s memorial service showed a tired president whose hopes for change had been thwarted.
“With an open heart”, he said, “we can worry less about which side has been wronged, and worry more about joining sides to do right”.
“Despite the fact that police conduct was the subject of the protest”.
“So much of the tensions between police departments and minority communities that they serve is because we ask the police to do too much and we ask too little of ourselves”, Obama said. “And you pretend as if there’s no context?” Obama told senior law enforcement officials on Monday that he sees the Dallas shooting as a hate crime, or one motivated by bias, said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police, who was in the closed-door meeting at the White House.
First lady Michelle Obama tries to keep her dress from blowing as she walks down the steps of Air Force One with President Barack Obama at Andrews Air Force Base in Md., Tuesday, July 12, 2016. “‘Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions, and this has strained our bonds of understanding and common objective”.
But Obama also made a call for Bush’s fellow Republicans to realize the cost of their opposition to gun control and spending on mental health and drug treatment.
But it was Obama who said the things that most needed saying.
“We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than to get his hands on a computer or even a book”. Obama will also meet the families of the slain policemen and others who were wounded, the White House said. Police are still working to nail down an exact motive. ‘I will give you a new heart, ‘ the Lord says, ‘and put a new spirit in you.
” “That doesn’t mean that I do not fear you”.
The officers were killed last week by a sniper at the end of a demonstration over the police shooting deaths of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, the latest in a line of such incidents.
Johnson was killed by an explosive device deployed on a robot after hours of police negotiations at El Centro College.
He told negotiators before he was killed that he wanted to murder white cops in revenge for the black deaths.
The memorial paid a poignant tribute to the fallen “peacemakers in blue” Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Lorne Ahrens and Michael Smith.
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Micah Johnson, 25, a U.S. military veteran, was killed on July 7 by police using an explosive device after he fatally shot five police officer in the streets of Dallas following a demonstration over police killings of African-Americans.
