Dallas Terror : US President Barack Obama insists Americans not polarized after recent US shooting deaths

US President Barack Obama attends a press conference during the second day of a NATO Summit at the Polish National Stadium in Warsaw on July 9, 2016. (photos by AFP)

 

President Barack Obama on Saturday rejected the notion that this week's stunning violence is a signal that the US has returned to some of the darkest days of its past, saying that as painful as the killings of police and black men were, "America is not as divided as some have suggested."
"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 from Warsaw, where he attended a NATO summit.
"That includes protesters," Obama added. "It includes family members who have grave concerns about police conduct and they've said that this is unacceptable. There's no division there."

Protesters march through the streets of Detroit as they rally against recent shootings involving police officers of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and the shooting in Dallas. Photo / AP

The comments marked the third time in as many days that Obama has spoken, from a distance, about the police-involved fatal shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota that were followed by a sniper attack in Dallas that killed five police officers Thursday night.

Seven officers and two civilians were also injured.
"This has been a tough week," the president said.
Obama said the Dallas shooter, a black Army veteran who was later killed by police, was a "demented individual" who does not represent black Americans, any more than a white man accused of killing blacks at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, represents whites.
Obama said he would visit Dallas "in a few days" to pay respects and mourn with the stricken Texas city. The shootings, and the ensuing protests in some US cities that followed, led to an uncharacteristic response from the president: He cut his five-day, two-country European trip to four days.
Obama still planned to go ahead with his first visit as president to Spain and was to arrive late Saturday in Madrid, the capital. But he has scrapped a stop in the southern city of Seville and will cram two days of events into one, including meetings with interim President Mariano Rajoy and a visit with US sailors stationed at a naval base in Rota.
In his news conference before departing Poland, Obama said that while "there is sorrow, there is anger, there is confusion" in the U.S., "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."
"So we cannot let the actions of a few define all of us," he said.
The president said he planned to convene a White House meeting in coming days 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 Dallas police officers even as they came under attack, had given him hope.

Dallas police officers comfort each other in Dallas in front of police cars decorated as a public memorial in front of police headquarters. Photo / AP

"That's the spirit that we all need to embrace," Obama said. "That's the spirit that I want to build on."
But Obama, who has angered his political opponents after every deadly mass shooting by calling for tighter gun laws, made clear that he will continue to speak out about the need for such measures, which the Republican-controlled Congress has refused to go along with. He said the US is unique among advanced countries in terms of the scale of violence that it experiences.
Obama also tried to calm public anxiety about personal safety, saying violent crime is actually down in the U.S.
"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."
Obama said US history was not repeating itself, and rejected the notion that a 1960s-style mindset had returned.
"You're not seeing riots and you're not seeing police going after people who are protesting peacefully," he said. "You've seen almost uniformly peaceful protests and you've seen, uniformly, police handling those protests with professionalism."
"So as tough, as hard, as depressing as the loss of life was this week, we've got a foundation to build on," Obama said. "We just have to have confidence that we can build on those better angels of our nature."

US President Barack Obama has urged Americans not to view the US as divided into opposing groups in a bid to pacify intense emotions after recent killing of five Dallas police officers by a gunman in apparent retaliation for persistent police brutality against African Americans across the country.
"First of all, as painful as this week has been, I firmly believe that America is not as divided as some have suggested," Obama said during a press conference at a NATO summit in the Polish capital Warsaw on Saturday.
"When we start suggesting that somehow there's this enormous polarization, and we're back to the situation in the '60s, that's just not true," He noted. "You're not seeing riots, and you're not seeing police going after people who are protesting peacefully."
The remarks came after five white police officers were gunned down by a black man, identified as former US Army Reserve soldier Micah Johnson, during a protest rally on Thursday.

People sit along Market Street in San Francisco, California, on July 08, 2016 to denounce recent police shootings around the country.

The march was sparked by the latest shooting deaths of African American men by police in the northern state of Minnesota and the southern state of Louisiana.
Dallas police chief David Brown said Johnson had told a negotiator that he wanted to kill white people, especially white police officers, because he was angry about the recent shootings of black men by police.
Obama, the first ever black president in US history, further stated that "Americans of all races and all backgrounds are rightly outraged by the inexcusable attacks on police, whether it's in Dallas or any place else."
The US president, who is cutting short his European trip on Sunday to visit the city of Dallas, also asserted that Americans are rightly troubled and enraged by the latest police killings of two more unarmed black men and about "the larger, persistent problem of African-Americans and Latinos being treated differently in our criminal justice system."