“I think we are the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries that are coming from our African-American fellow citizens – and we have so much more to be done, and we have got to get about the business of doing it”.
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The week’s events mark the second time the presidential campaign has been upended by violence.
There is one factual error in Trump’s statement. “You know we need to listen to African-Americans who say they feel on edge all the time”.
And New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is also being vetted for the post, was set to appear with Trump in Miami on Friday before the event was cancelled because of the mass shooting in Dallas.
The shootings in Dallas prompted Clinton to cancel a campaign rally with Vice President Joe Biden in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where an aide said she planned to address the killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
Clinton delivered a somber speech later Friday night at the African Methodist Episcopal Convention in Philadelphia, at which she read off the names of the officers killed in Dallas as well as the victims of police shootings in recent years.
The shootings marked yet another convulsive event in the 2016 political season, one in which Clinton and Trump have scrambled to find the right response to terror attacks overseas, mass shootings at home, and protests over police killings of African Americans.
“This morning I offer my thoughts and prayers for all of the victims’ families, and we pray for our courageous police officers and first responders who risk their lives to protect us every single day”. Clinton personally signs the relatively small number of tweets she writes with “-H”.
“Prayers and condolences to all of the families who are so thoroughly devastated by the horrors we are all watching take place in our country”, read the tweet.
With the nation in turmoil over the ambush murders of police officers and police killings of minorities, Vice President Joseph R. Biden urged Americans Saturday to stand together. “That is insulting to the men and women in blue who risk their lives to protect ours. They were protecting a peaceful march”. “May god protect our fallen heroes and bring peace upon the city of Dallas”.
Biden praised the slain officers as people who joined the force because they thought “they could help, that they should serve, that they had a duty”. Five police officers were killed and nine people were injured in the attack. “The fact is that there are communities in America where black families tell us that they are fearful with interacting with local law enforcement”.
Some members of Texas’s congressional delegation also used social media to offer their support. “We need to try, as best we can, to walk in one another’s shoes”.
As Americans, we are wounded by all of these deaths.
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And Murphy – who launched a Senate filibuster in response to the terror attack in Orlando in an attempt to spur action on gun control legislation – expressed frustration, placing the Dallas attacks in the larger context of gun violence. He’s right that “more” needs to be done, but I have no confidence that the “more” in question will involve increased scrutiny of the police.
