President Barack Obama will keep his focus on reducing tensions between police departments and the communities they serve as he moves from an extraordinary closed-door meeting at the White House’s executive offices to a nationally televised town hall that will air Thursday.
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Relatives of slain Dallas police officer Patrick Zamarripa, the mother of Sterling’s teenage son Cameron and others discuss on a CNN town hall Wednesday night how a divided country grapples with these tragedies.
“From the law enforcement perspective, we hear it, we understand it”, said Terry Cunningham, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
“The roots of the problems we saw this week date back not just decades, date back centuries”, Obama said.
In what many have described as cringe-worthy viewing, former US President George Bush awkwardly danced to a hymn during a Dallas memorial service on Tuesday.
Obama has devoted much of the week to the issue of violence by police and against police officers, a few days after a black Army veteran killed five police officers in revenge for police shooting black men in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and the Minneapolis suburbs.
Instead, Obama has sought to give voice to opposing concerns, lamenting both the killing of frequent blacks by police officers and the acts of retribution that have sometimes followed.
Dallas shootings: Who were the victims?
Cunningham said the Dallas Police Department exemplified that commitment to their community when officers used themselves as human shields to protect bystanders from possibly being shot.
The White House has declined that request, and Obama insisted he’s condemned anti-police rhetoric plenty already.
People wasted no time ripping into Obama’s predecessor for what many saw as his less-than-appropriate demeanor.
But Obama also said that data shows disparities in how African-Americans are treated by police. “I think that too often we comment about statistics”.
“We all carry around with us some assumptions about other people”, Obama said.
Even still, some law enforcement leaders have accused Obama of scapegoating police.
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“I’m not suggesting that I always get that fine line perfectly – but if I don’t say anything at a time when people feel hurt, angry, there are protests, there are flare-ups, then I wouldn’t be doing my job”, he said.
