On the streets of the city, officers from nearby jurisdictions patrolled to give Dallas officers, their badges still marked by black tape, a chance to attend and mourn. And he has argued that, despite the heated public outcry of the past week, the country is not as divided as it may seem. And in Congress, lawmakers said they were forming a task force to examine police accountability and aggression toward law enforcement.
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Obama was meeting Wednesday with police officers at the White House – the second such session this week.
The scene unfolded at a memorial service after a week when Americans were jarred by video images of angry crowds protesting police killings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota and heard the screams of Thursday’s sniper attack on police in Dallas by a black former US soldier who had said he wanted to “kill white people”. “I know how far we’ve come against impossible odds”, he said.
“We wonder if an African-American community that feels unfairly targeted by police, and police departments that feel unfairly maligned for doing their jobs, can ever understand each other’s experience”, he said. “And this has strained our bonds of understanding and common goal”, he added.
Albert Carter, Sterling’s 44-year-old half-brother, wore a tie with a grinning Alton on it. He said he hopes Sterling’s death prompts police reform in Baton Rouge. Police have said they found a gun in Sterling’s pocket.
“Your loved ones’ time with you was too short, and they did not get the chance to properly say goodbye”, he said.
For Obama, the moment was a chance to try to defuse what some have described as a national powder keg of emotions over race, justice, gun violence and policing. These two tragic murders, among many others, continue to ignite the fire behind the Black Lives Matter campaign, which has sparked a new platform called Campaign Zero. It’s a posture neither side has completely accepted. Obama denounced the shooting as a “vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement” by a “demented” individual.
Some protesters, meanwhile, questioned why Obama rushed home from Europe to attend the service in Dallas before meeting with the communities grieving their dead in Minnesota and Louisiana.
“Baton Rouge, Minneapolis and Dallas are etched deep into our consciousness”.
The president, joined by his wife, Michelle, and Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, will also meet privately with the families of the slain officers as well as the injured to convey the support and gratitude for their service and sacrifice that has been expressed around the country.
Politics demands a certain level of enforced and artificial cordiality at times, and that surely was part of the chemistry as the men who between them have occupied the White House for the past almost 16 year paid their respects to those officers. “I’ve seen how inadequate my own words have been”.
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“You are seeing at trade shows robotic systems that are mounted with things like tear gas launchers”, said Peter Singer, who has studied and written extensively on the technology and warfare, and the author of “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century”. In each instance, he acknowledges the hard and unsafe work that police do.
