President Barack Obama says America is “not as divided as some suggest” while acknowledging this has been “a very tough week” for the nation. U.S. President Barack Obama and other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation leaders have begun the second day of a summit meeting in Warsaw that’s expected to lead to decisions about Afghanistan, the central Mediterranean and Iraq. On Friday police announced that, before he was killed, Johnson had said he was “upset about Black Lives Matter” and had expressed a desire to kill white officers.
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People across the country joined protests and held vigils late this week, following two highly publicized police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota. In addition to the five killed, Johnson injured another seven officers and two civilians.
Speaking from Warsaw, Obama added that the Dallas shooter, was a “demented individual” who did not represent black Americans, any more than a white man who killed nine black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, previous year represents white people.
“Recognizing that we’re in a fluid political moment in Spain as they are sorting through the aftermath of their election, we want to make sure that we are interacting with all of Spain’s major political parties”, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said ahead of the president’s trip.
“So we can not let the actions of a few define us all”, Obama said. “You’ve seen nearly uniformly peaceful protests and you’ve seen, uniformly, police handling those protests with professionalism”.
“When we start suggesting that somehow there’s this enormous polarisation and we’re back to the situation in the 60s and – that’s just not true”, Obama said.
Thousands of people across the United States marched in protests honoring the fallen police officers and against police violence towards minorities overnight on Friday.
“The demented individual who carried out those attacks in Dallas, he’s no more representative of African-Americans than the shooter in Charleston was representative of white Americans or the shooter in Orlando or San Bernardino were representative of Muslim-Americans”, Obama said, referring to a string of mass shootings in the past year.
Snipers operating from rooftops in Dallas killed five police officers and wounded six more in a coordinated attack during one of several protests across the country against the killing of two black men by police this week.
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and countless other leaders have said that the city needs to enter a time of healing, unite and start having some hard conversations about race. “That’s the spirit that I want to build on”.
The U.S.is helping to organize an worldwide conference on migration in September, with Obama noting that “a few countries shouldn’t be shouldering the burden for 60 million refugees”.
Obama also tried to calm public anxiety about personal safety, saying violent crime is actually down in the U.S.
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Obama sought to turn more US strategic attention to Asia during his presidency but has been dragged back to Europe and the Middle East by conflicts in Ukraine and Syria. “We just have to have confidence that we can build on those better angels of our nature”.
