But Mr Obama expressed optimism and said the participants, including members of the Black Lives Matter movement, agreed that such conversations needed to continue despite emotions running raw.
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People wasted no time ripping into Obama’s predecessor for what many saw as his less-than-appropriate demeanor. Because as much as Mr. Obama’s words have comforted blacks, they have rankled numerous nation’s men and women in blue. “It underscores that that’s a tough job and we have to keep that in mind”, the president said. The suspected attacker reportedly made comments saying he was upset by the recent police shootings and that he sought to kill police, especially white officers. Also critical, he said, was to better train police to avoid “implicit biases”.
“When all this takes place, more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we can not simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoia”, Obama said. If people are honest with themselves, he added, “oftentimes there is a presumption that black men are risky”. But Americans, I think, have a great advantage: To renew our unity, we only need to remember our values.
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.
Obama told Patrick he has been “unequivocal” in his support for police. Twitter, in particular, became a battleground for those who agreed and those who disagreed with the president’s actions.
Even with the televised town hall, the White House echoed his reluctance to be the face of the debate.
“We’re not at a point yet where communities of color feel confident that their police departments are serving them with dignity and respect and equality”, Obama said.
Obama, who cut short a Europe trip after the Dallas killings, has found himself squarely in the middle of the crisis. It’s one of the deadliest attacks on law enforcement in 100 years. Some of Obama’s critics have even suggested he’s partially to blame for attacks on police.
Yet Obama has always been wary of that role. After the three separate tragedies, it’s hard to do anything but despair, but Obama’s speech during the service called for both hope and accountability, echoing sentiments expressed by Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and Dallas Police Chief David Brown in the days following the shooting.
Obama travelled to Dallas with what has become a depressingly familiar task – consoling a country stunned by gun violence, following Thursday’s sniper-style shooting by a black gunman intent on killing whites.
“Like police officers across the country, these men and their families shared a commitment to something larger than themselves”, Obama said. 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 has been blunt about the limitations of presidential words or pat policy proposals. This is the bridge across our nation’s deepest divisions. “And we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets, and everybody will feign concern until it goes away, and then we’ll go about our business as usual”. And in Congress, lawmakers were forming a task force to examine police accountability and aggression toward police.
