WARSAW, Poland — President Barack Obama on Saturday rejected any notion that the past week’s stunning violence signals a return to racial brutality of a dark past, saying that as painful as the killings of police and black men were, “America is not as divided as some have suggested.”
WARSAW, Poland — President Barack Obama on Saturday rejected any notion that the past week’s stunning violence signals a return to racial brutality of a dark past, saying that as painful as the killings of police and black men were, “America is not as divided as some have suggested.”
With five Dallas police officers dead at the hands of a sniper and two black men dead at the hands of police, Obama appealed to Americans not to be overwhelmed by fear of a return to 1960s-style chaos and to understand the progress that has been made in racial relations since that time.
“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.”
Obama spoke at the conclusion of a NATO summit in Warsaw before leaving for Spain, part of a farewell trip to Europe he was cutting short by one day because of the developments at home.
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. Seven other officers and two civilians were also injured.
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.
The president 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 U.S. cities, led to an uncharacteristic response from the president: He cut his five-day, two-country European trip to four days. On his flight to Spain, he called Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to offer his condolences on behalf of the American people, the White House said.
While Obama proceeded with his plan to visit Madrid, he scrapped a stop in the southern city of Seville. He was cramming two days of events into one, including meetings with interim President Mariano Rajoy and a visit with U.S. 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.”