Barack Obama addressed on Saturday the sniper attack in Dallas that killed five officers and its relationship to the broader movement against police violence, declaring: “We cannot let the actions of a few define all of us.”
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, last year represented white people.
It is the third time in as many days that the president has spoken from afar on the police shootings in Baton Rouge and Minneapolis, which have reignited protests across the country.
“There is sorrow, there is anger, there is confusion” about how the US will move forward, Obama said. “But there’s unity in recognizing that this is not how we want our communities to operate. This is not who we want to be as Americans, and that serves as the basis for us being able to move forward in a constructive and positive way.”
During a peaceful Black Lives Matter march over the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, a gunman, Micah Johnson, a 25-year-old black veteran, began a vicious and planned attack on Dallas officers from an elevated position. In addition to the five killed, Johnson injured another seven officers and two civilians. 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.
“Americans of all races and all backgrounds are rightly outraged by the inexcusable attacks on police, whether it’s in Dallas or anyplace else,” Obama said at a press conference during a Nato summit.
“That includes protesters. It includes family members who have grave concerns about police conduct and they’ve said that this is unacceptable,” Obama added. “There’s no division there.”
Obama said he would visit Dallas “in a few days” to pay respects and mourn with the stricken Texas city.
The president also confirmed he planned to convene a White House meeting next week with police officers, community and civil rights activists and others to talk about next steps. He said the “empathy and understanding” that Americans have shown in responding to the events of the past few days, including among Dallas police officers as they came under attack, had given him hope.
“That’s the spirit that we all need to embrace. That’s the spirit that I want to build on,” Obama said.
It will not be the first time Obama has held such a gathering at the White House during his two terms, which have been marred by racially inflammatory incidents such as the killings of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Most recently, in February, the president hosted a meeting with leaders from multiple generations of civil rights activism to address issues such as police brutality and criminal justice reform.
Obama also made it clear that he would continue to speak out about the need to tighten access to guns in the United States, steps the Republican-controlled Congress has refused to go along with.
He added that the prevalence of guns in US society was one factor behind the violence, and the fact that there was a gun in the car contributed to the shooting of a black Minnesota man last week.“I am going to keep on talking about the fact that we cannot eliminate all racial tension in our country overnight,” he said. “We are not going to be able to identify, ahead of time, and eliminate every madman or troubled individual who might want to do harm against innocent people. But we can make it harder for them to do so.”
“In Minneapolis, we don’t know yet what happened, but we do know that there was a gun in the car that apparently was licensed but it caused, in some fashion, those tragic events,” the president told reporters.
“We can’t just ignore that and pretend that that’s somehow political,” he continued. “It is a contributing factor – not the sole factor – but a contributing factor to the broader tensions that arise between police and the communities where they serve.”
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