Obama plans deliver remarks at an interfaith memorial service for the officers, his visit to the grief-stricken city comes following an invitation from Dallas Mayor Rawlings, the White House announced today.
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As news of the Dallas attack broke, Mr Obama returned to the podium in Poland, where he was attending a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit, to say he was “horrified” by the shootings, which he called a “vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement”.
He says police officers at times have very little margin for error in making decisions because guns are so plentiful. “So if you care about the safety of our police officers, then you can’t set aside the gun issue and pretend that that’s irrelevant”.
He says the USA cannot identify every trouble individual before they do harm to innocent people, but it can make it harder for them to do so.
The gunman who killed five police officers at a protest march had practiced military-style drills in his yard and trained at a private self-defense school that teaches special tactics, including “shooting on the move”, a maneuver in which an attacker fires and changes position before firing again.
Authorities say that during the traffic stop, Yanez approached Castile’s vehicle from the driver’s side and another officer approached from the passenger side. Obama did not outline any specific steps, but suggested that a starting point was the report of a commission he established after the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.
“Historically, African-Americans have viewed guns kind of like the boogeyman – ‘The master told you not to look at the gun and we shouldn’t touch a gun, ‘” Smith said.
President Barack Obama said he will cut short a foreign trip and visit Dallas next week as the shooting rampage by the black army veteran, who said he wanted to kill white cops, triggered urgent calls to mend troubled race relations in the United States.
The president described the prevalence of guns in some poor neighborhoods as a contributing factor to the broader tensions between police and the people they are supposed to protect.
Since his arrival in Warsaw Friday, Obama has been forced to juggle high tensions over two police-involved shootings in Baton Rouge and Minneapolis, as well as the brutal sniper attack in Dallas Thursday night that left five police officers dead. He cited the deadly protest in Dallas on Thursday as an example. He says Micah Johnson also insisted on speaking with a black negotiator and wrote in blood on the wall of a parking garage where police cornered and later killed him. But they have become slightly more common: during George H.W. Bush’s administration (the first administration for which the Federal Bureau of Investigation provides complete data) roughly eight officers died in ambush attacks each year.
He peered into one office, greeting an officer.
The attack, which city officials labeled an “ambush”, happened toward the end of a peaceful demonstration against the killing of two black men by police officers in Minnesota and Louisiana earlier this week.
In Georgia, Missouri and Tennessee, authorities said gun-wielding civilians also shot officers in individual attacks that came after two black men were killed this week in Louisiana and Minnesota.
And that recognition, Obama added, “serves as the basis for us being able to move forward in a constructive and positive way”.
Obama spent most of Sunday in Spain, between Madrid and Rota Naval Station, where he addressed American service members aboard the USS Ross.
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Johnson had served in the USA military in the Afghan war.
