Obama, who prides himself on his measured approach, is usually loath to alter carefully laid plans.
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“Any violence directed at police officers is a reprehensible crime”, Obama said at a news conference in Madrid.
A respectful debate, Obama said, is “what’s going to ultimately help make the job of being a cop a lot safer”.
One of the United States’ great virtues, Obama said, is its openness to protest and efforts to speak truth to power.
This was not, he insisted, the crisis-ridden days of the 1960s, when U.S. cities burned, the Vietnam War raged and the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King were slain. Snipers opened fire on police officers in the heart of Dallas during protests over two recent fatal police shootings of black men.
President Barack Obama on Sunday urged respect and restraint from Americans angered by the killing of black men by police, saying anything less does a “disservice to the cause” of ridding the criminal justice system of racial bias. During the Cold War, nuclear weapons were positioned there.
They form an integral part of a European missile defense system much despised by Russian Federation.
The transfer of the system to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation control was a key part of an alliance summit in Warsaw which stressed deterring Moscow from destabilizing eastern Europe. Obama is in Warsaw attending the NATO Summit. The threat led officials to lock down the headquarters and several blocks surrounding the building as a “precautionary measure”, a police statement said.
Rajoy’s conservative People’s Party (PP) failed to win a parliamentary majority in a repeat election last month, meaning the deadlock is set to continue with the possibility of a third round of elections in the future.
After the meeting with Rajoy, Obama lauded the long-standing ties between the US and Spain and complimented new economic policies that he said had begun to “bear fruit” in a country with about 20 percent unemployment.
Meanwhile, dozens of people braved the heat Sunday at noon to protest outside the U.S. Embassy, some carrying signs against the TTIP free trade deal being negotiated between the U.S. and European Union, and banners that read “Obama go home” or “War”.
After arriving from Spain late Sunday, Obama will fly Tuesday to Dallas.
Among those arrested in Louisiana was an activist prominent in the Black Lives Matter movement, which gained national prominence following earlier deaths of mostly unarmed Black men at the hands of police across the U.S.
In his remarks on Sunday, Obama repeated that most US police officers are doing a good job, and said rhetoric portraying them as doing otherwise does little to build support for overhauling a criminal justice system that is widely recognized as biased against minorities.
He asked activists to maintain a respectful and serious tone, which will “mobilize American society to bring about real change”.
King Felipe also gave the president a gift for visiting: Per the Royal Palace, the King gave him an English edition of Don Quixote, edited by Penguin and translated by John Rutherford, with leather covers stamped with a US seal and the Royal House seal. “And so some of this was just venting, but I think that the overwhelming majority of people who are involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, what they really want to see is a better relationship between police and the community”.
The Dallas police chief says the suspect in the deadly attack on officers taunted authorities during two hours of negotiations, laughing at them and at one point asking how many officers he had shot. The book is in English, and it bears both the US and the Spain’s Royal House stamps on the custom leather cover. Tourists and curiosity seekers lined some streets in hopes of catching a glimpse of Obama, and local TV aired wall-to-wall coverage of his movements. Greeting King Felipe at the Royal Palace in Madrid, Obama acknowledged that “we’ve had a hard week in the United States”.
Instead Obama, who landed in Madrid late on Saturday night, squeezed in sessions with King Felipe VI and acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on Sunday.
The king thanked Obama for visiting under the circumstances.
Obama will later visit a United States and Spanish Naval Station at Rota, in southern Spain, and address the USA personnel who have been stationed at the mouth of the Mediterranean since a deal with Spain’s former dictator Francisco Franco. He planned to tour the USS Ross, one of four guided-missile destroyers based there, and address troops there before the flight home.
The Dallas shooter is not representative of blacks, the president said, just as the man who killed people at a historic African-American church a year ago in Charleston is not representative of whites, and the Muslim-American who killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub last month is not representative of Muslim-Americans. The president of the United States apologized to the attendees for having to shorten his visit to the European country, but multiple shootings back in his country require the head of state’s presence.
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“If we have to repeat the elections it would be a joke that would affect not only the Spanish economy but the credibility of our country both here and overseas”, Rajoy told a news conference with Obama at his official residence.
