During a Tuesday stop in Chicago, President Obama addresses the worldwide Association of Chiefs of Police telling them that they often get scapegoated for the broader failures of society and the criminal justice system. Many in law enforcement feel under siege these days – or at the very least not given the benefit of the doubt – by the Black Lives Matter movement and video monitoring by civilians.
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“Yeah there’s middle ground: get rid of most gun laws…go after actual criminals and beef up criminal control”. Supporters of gun rights have cited the frequent shootings as evidence that strict gun laws, such as those in Chicago, don’t work.
Chief Will Johnson of the Arlington, Texas Police Department(second from left) speaks on relationships between law enforcement and community as Cornell Brooks, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Chief Kathleen O’Toole of the Seattle Police Department, and Vanita Gupta, acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division(from left to right), listen in a talk on the future of law enforcement.
He said it is “a travesty” that he can’t tell the families of shooting victims that America is doing all it can to prevent gun violence.
The number of Americans in favor of more gun restrictions is steadily increasing.
In this way, we can compare the status of guns to the status of alcohol, as drinking too is encouraged and glorified in popular culture, and many alcoholics don’t receive the rigorous treatment they need. The budget he sent to Congress proposes increasing funds to those sorts of police programs, Obama said.
“This makes it incredibly easy for gun traffickers, violent offenders, and other prohibited purchasers to buy guns undetected”, the report says.
“I reject any narrative that seeks to divide police and communities that they serve”. “It’s a societal problem in Chicago…I don’t know what in the world Indiana could have to do with their inability to deal with their criminal activity”.
A day after police chiefs from around the United States called for universal background checks to be required in order to purchase firearms, President Barack Obama weighed in on the issue of gun control in an address to top law enforcement officers in his adopted hometown of Chicago, which has been plagued by gun violence in recent years. The media, he said, “tends to focus on the sensational and the controversial, and folks on both sides who say stuff that’s not created to bring people together”.
“When an individual officer does display bias or excessive force, which is gonna happen, just like there are going to be politicians who do stupid things, or business leaders… there’s no profession that doesn’t have somebody that sometimes screws up”, Obama said. “In you, we often see America at its best”. Criminal justice is one of the key issues Obama is hoping to tackle during his second term and one of the few that has been met with some bipartisan agreement among lawmakers. “It is possible for us to come up with strategies to effectively reduce the damage of the drug trade without relying exclusively on incarceration”.
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Crimes commit with “assault rifles” are so low that the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t even track them, and make up a few fractional percentage of just 285 rifle-related homicides previous year in a nation of 320 million people. “He ran toward danger because he was a cop”, Obama told the officers.
