“It is so hard trying to keep them out of harm’s way when your trying to keep a job and do right”.
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But Erica Garner apparently sat through the meeting expecting to have a moment to ask a question about her father’s case, and that moment never came.
Toya Graham, 44, who attended the town hall with her son, Michael, said that although she had sent him away because of her own fears for his life, he has been returning to the neighborhood on weekends.
“Though this may seem counterintuitive, we know from our experience as law enforcement officials that over-relying on incarceration does not deter crime”, they wrote.
Texas Gov. Dan Patrick on Thursday blamed President Barack Obama for using divisive language in support of two black men shot by white police officers. “I have presided over more memorials of mass shootings than I would like”. “You all jerked me around”.
The nation’s first black President discussed similar themes at the D.C. town hall.
In a later tweet, Garner clarified that her frustration is not with Obama, but with the network for failing to follow through on its promise that she would be able to speak.
The town hall meeting about tensions between African Americans and police was recorded to be broadcast in prime time.
“Some police officers make mistakes”.
Patrick said that after a Wednesday meeting at the White House, Obama said “the tension between the police and between black America is only going to get worse”.
“People were listening to one another and I think the president came up with a lot of great solutions”, she said. I’ve spoken on panels – whoever you can think of I’ve spoken with them.
Obama simply ignored Patrick’s blue-light request, and then changed the subject.
The Lt. Gov. also faulted Obama for “being too quick to condemn the police without due process and until the facts are known”.
How much of a problem exists in police departments over race and how much such may be exaggerated for political purposes is a matter of debate. While President Obama has struck conciliatory tones in the days following the massacre in Dallas – straddling equal measures of empathy for police and the Black Lives Matter movement – Patrick has taken on a decidedly pro-police stance.
The president rejected the notion that he was not giving adequate support to the police.
“I think that the place to start is for everybody to recognize that we need police officers, and we need those police officers to be embraced by the community”. “Being on both sides of the coin – as being a police officer and also as being an African-American mother – it was incredible”.
At the town hall, he took the opportunity to do so again.
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“And some of it involves us being very conscious of our assumptions because white folks and Latino folks also carry some assumptions”, he said. For example, at the Dallas commemoration for the five dead cops, Obama warned his support that “for those who use rhetoric suggesting harm to police, even if they don’t act on it themselves, well, they not only make the jobs of police officers even more risky, but they do a disservice to the very cause of justice that they claim to promote”.
