Obama was traveling Tuesday to Chicago to address the global Association of Chiefs of Police, which is meeting in the president’s hometown. “I spoke to officers privately in one big city precinct who described being surrounded by young people with mobile phone cameras held high, taunting them the moment they get out of their cars”, Comey said last week at the University of Chicago.
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Obama repeatedly praised the officers that risk their lives daily to keep people safe around the country.
While not denying that police misbehave, oftentimes with brutal – and deadly – consequences, and disproportionally in disadvantaged communities of color, the president said that law enforcement is too often unfairly thrust into the role of maintaining order in communities where people have been so economically and socially marginalized that they’ve lost all hope and trust in the system.
Yet he also said there was need for a debate about bias in the criminal justice system that discriminated against minority communities.
At a White House forum last week on the subject, Obama argued that cops deserve the public’s respect because policing is a ‘dangerous job.’ He also said that Black Lives Matter activists are raising ‘legitimate issues, ‘ though, and their complaints should be taken seriously.
The President says word of irresponsible actions by police quickly spreads but many cases of effective police work rarely make it on the evening news.
“You know as well as I do the tensions in a few communities…those sentiments don’t just come out of nowhere”, Obama said.
Lax gun laws don’t mean more freedom; they mean more fallen officers, Obama said, pledging to ask Congress again to reconsider failed attempts to pass gun safety legislation.
Despite insisting on the need to lesson automatic responses to such events, however, Obama concluded by making reference to to several community programs in which citizens teamed up with police to monitor their own neighborhoods, and vice versa. “We’re talking about commonsense measures to make sure that criminals don’t get them, to make sure we are protecting ourselves”. “It is easier in a few communities to find a gun than to find fresh vegetables at a supermarket”, he continued.
“In today’s YouTube world, there are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime”, he said. He renewed calls for stronger gun laws, including background checks and banning the sale of military-style weapons to civilians.
Obama opened his speech with a tribute to slain New York City police officer Randolph Holder as hundreds of fellow officers attended his wake in Manhattan. (On Monday, Comey said at the IACP conferencethat he had no hard proof for the idea.) His remarks reportedly irritated Justice Department officials. Crime-stricken communities “have to give police officers the benefit of the doubt”, he said.
“Current rules on background checks apply to licensed dealers, but up to 40 percent of firearms sales involve private parties or gun shows and do not require checks”, Reuters reported.
The third main point Obama raised at Tuesday’s conference is perhaps the most controversial: Gun control. “You just gotta hop across the border”, he said.
“We’ll be able to make sure that the society is a partner with law enforcement”, Mr Obama said. “There are a lot of African Americans who have that same kind of story”.
“That’s America at its best”, Obama said. Investing in everything from bulletproof vests to crime data collection can all help police do their job more effectively, he said.
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The re-examination of law enforcement practices frequently goes hand in hand with the national conversation about mass incarceration and why the the United States’ incarcerated population of 1.5 million is disproportionately black.
