“I’ve seen how a spirit of unity, born of tragedy, can gradually dissipate, overtaken by the return to business as usual, by inertia and old habits and expediency”, he said Tuesday. She had streamed on Facebook the aftermath of Castile’s shooting by police last week.
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She said she’s scared for her daughter’s future and asked the president, “What do we do?” Also critical, he said, is to better train police to avoid “implicit biases”.
“Treating people like you’d want to be treated yourself”, suggested Casaday, “Just communicating with each other”.
He added: “And, and so we shouldn’t get too caught up in this notion that somehow people who are asking for fair treatment are somehow automatically anti-police, are trying to only look out for black lives as opposed to others”.
President Barack Obama hosts a conversation on community policing and criminal justice in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building of the White House on Wednesday.
The meeting was called in response to events last week that have many Americans concerned.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said there would be law enforcement officers in the room who are deeply troubled by Black Lives Matter activists.
With the country already on edge with the Isis threat, race relations have hit an all-time low with police shootings of black men and the retaliatory execution of five police officers by a clearly deranged black man, Micah Johnson.
Trying to shift the conversation away from the blame game, the President acknowledged the Country’s “not even close to being there yet”.
Obama faced several pointed questions during a town hall broadcast on television network ABC exploring the emotionally charged issues surrounding policing and racial discrimination in the United States. The paper reported that Obama said afterward that “there are still deep divisions about how to solve these problems” of race, policing and accusations of excessive force. When it comes to shootings by police, “they can’t be right every time”, he said.
Obama has been blunt about the limitations of presidential words or policy proposals.
During the hour-long discussion, moderated by ABC News’ David Muir, with victims, parents, police officers and activists, he didn’t once utter the word “racism” but he did say that “Americans need police”, a claim that has been contested various times by scholars and activists alike.
“So the question, I think, for all of us is how do we try to lessen those barriers and those misunderstandings?”
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Information for this article was contributed by Darlene Superville of The Associated Press.
