President Barack Obama has said the U.S. is “not even close” to where it needs to be in bridging the divide between police and the communities they serve.
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President Barack Obama on Wednesday said more must be done to build trust that police violence against blacks and Hispanics will be properly investigated.
“We have to, as a country, sit down and just grind it out, to solve these problems”, Obama said.
Obama emerged from Wednesday’s almost four-hour-long meeting acknowledging it’s fair to say the country will experience more tensions between police and the communities they serve for quite some time, and that Americans will “have to, as a country, sit down and just grind it out”.
Obama said there might be a need to develop a set of practices to ensure that investigations are carried out effectively and fairly for all parties involved.
The prime-time discussion on race relations and policing, airing on ABC and ESPN, forms a more public version of a conversation the president held Wednesday in private with leaders from police departments, civil rights groups and the Black Lives Matter movement – groups whose deep distrust, Obama suggested, has often left them talking past one another.
Those attending the meeting included Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana and Mayor Chris Coleman of St. Paul, Minnesota, the two locations where police shootings sparked protests around the country.
Sharpton said the talk, however, must lead to change.
Biden said Obama asked the police officials at the meeting: “Fellas, what do you think I’m not doing?”
The massacre in Dallas, which left five police officers killed and 11 people injured, 9 police and 2 civilians, is now the deadliest attack on USA law enforcement since the 9/11 attacks on NY. And in Congress, lawmakers said they were forming a task force to examine police accountability and aggression toward law enforcement. This is about emotion. “This is about fear in the community and it’s our job to make people safe”.
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A White House task force released a report past year recommending various reforms for local law enforcement in the United States, but Obama said more action is needed. He said that going forward he wants to hear from more Americans about how to address “these challenges together as one nation”. “I’ll be happy to send it to you, in case you missed it”, he said.
