Are president’s recommendations on policing enough?

By Askia Muhammad -Senior Editor- | Last updated: Jul 14, 2016 - 10:58:15 AM

President Barack Obama speaks about the events in Dallas at the beginning of his news conference at PGE National Stadium in Warsaw, Poland, July 9. Pres. Obama is in Warsaw attending the NATO Summit. Photo: AP/Wide World Photo

WASHINGTON—As the nation recoiled from watching two brutal killings of Black men by police officers, and the slaughter of five Dallas police by an Army veteran reportedly in retaliation to law enforcement's abuses of Blacks, all occurring in a three-day span, President Barack Obama rushed home from Spain to speak to a nation in a time of crisis. At Final Call press time, the White House announced Mr. Obama would deliver remarks at a memorial service in Dallas for the slain officers.

After lamenting the deaths of the police officers, Mr. Obama went on. “Americans of all races and all backgrounds are also rightly saddened and angered about the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and about the larger, persistent problem of African Americans and Latinos being treated differently in our criminal justice system,” he said in Warsaw.

“When people are armed with powerful weapons, unfortunately it makes it more deadly and more tragic,” Mr. Obama said at a middle-of-the-night, local time press conference as videos of the dead Black men caused grave alarm back home.

Mr. Obama was seeking to smooth over the depth of racial tension back home. “So 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,” the President said at the conclusion of the NATO summit. “You’re not seeing riots, and you’re not seeing police going after people who are protesting peacefully. You’ve seen almost uniformly peaceful protests. And you’ve seen uniformly police handling those protests with professionalism.”

But despite years of what appears to be gentle treatment—reduced charges, few convictions, and lenient sentences—of police in the Black Lives Matter-era, since Eric Garner was choked to death by police, caught on video, the Obama administration has come under heavy criticism from Republicans after the Dallas police shootings for “politicizing” the horrors, and complaining about the easy availability of guns.

One Republican former member of Congress actually declared “war” on the President and the Black Lives Matter movement. “Obama says Cops are racist so 2 uneducated black thugs shoot 10 Dallas Cops tonight, killing 4. Wake up silent majority. Stand w our Cops,” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) tweeted. “It’s time 4 patriotic Americans to stand up & stand against all the Cop haters - from Obama to the thugs on the street. It’s way past time,” he continued.

The pressure may have had an effect. “The fact that he’s coming back from Poland, and going to Dallas, not going to Baton Rouge, not going to Minnesota before he goes to Dallas, fails to put these entire atrocities into any context,” Dr. Wilmer Leon, a political scientist and host of “Inside the Issues,” on SIRIUS-XM Satellite Radio told The Final Call.

“One thing the Republicans have been very successful at doing and the mainstream media has facilitated this quite handsomely, is to paint the Black Lives Matter movement as an anti-police movement. But it is just an anti-bad-police movement.

“We have to understand the historical context from which this discussion has to spring. We have to understand slavery in this country. We have to understand slave patrols in this country. The role slave patrols played, and how, particularly in the South, many of those slave patrols became police forces,” Dr. Leon continued.

“The first step of a solution for this problem, begin with the ‘Blue Wall of Silence’, it has to become the ‘Blue Wall of intolerance.’ Good cops can no longer sit idly by, behind this blue wall of silence and allow their fellow bad officers to rape and pillage the community,” he said.

Mr. Obama continued to stress the positive. “…one of the things that gives me hope this week is actually seeing how the overwhelming majority of Americans have reacted—with empathy and understanding.

“We’ve seen activists and grassroots groups who have expressed concern about police shootings, but are also adamant in their support of the Dallas Police Department—which is particularly appropriate because the Dallas Police Department is a great example of a department that has taken the issue of police shootings seriously and has engaged in an approach that has not only brought down their murder rates but also drastically reduced complaints around police misconduct,” the President said.

He promised to dust off and revitalize an old commission. “…next week, using the task force that we had set up after Ferguson,” Mr. Obama said, “but also building on it, and inviting both police and law enforcement and community activists and civil rights leaders, bringing them together to the White House, I want to start moving on constructive actions that are actually going to make a difference, because that is what all Americans want.”

The president along with Vice-president Joe Biden met with law enforcement leaders July 11 in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. According to a White House press release the purpose of the meeting was for the president and vice-president to hear directly from law enforcement officials about their ideas on best practices for building trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve. They discussed implementation of the reforms and recommendations laid out by Mr. Obama’s 21st Century Policing Task Force in 2015.

The Final Call