US president will abandon European tour in a bid to help address ‘persistent racial disparities in our criminal justice system’
Barack Obama is
to abandon a European visit and travel to the site of the killing of
five police officers in Texas, in a new effort to ease tensions between
law enforcement and African Americans that have been at breaking point
for almost two years.
Obama will head early next week to Dallas,
a city reeling from the deadliest day for American police since the
September 11 terrorist attacks, the White House said, as protests
against the fatal shootings of black men by officers continued across
the country.
He
will also try to “bring people together to support our police officers
and communities, and find common ground by discussing policy ideas for
addressing the persistent racial disparities in our criminal justice
system,” said his press secretary, Josh Earnest.
Cutting
short a planned tour of Spain, the first black US president will return
to a nation whose stark divide on race was brought to the fore once
again by the assassination of five policemen in Dallas by a black
military veteran said to have been targeting white people.
They
were the first deaths of law enforcement around demonstrations over the
use of force by police since the intense unrest sparked by the fatal
police shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014.
Conservatives
were quick to accuse Obama of having blood on his hands for delivering
remarks hours before the Dallas shootings in which he urged white
Americans to take seriously the Black Lives Matter protest movement’s
grievances over racism in the criminal justice system.
He was sharply criticised by Heather Mac Donald, an influential rightwing author who is a leading proponent of the so-called “Ferguson effect”,
which holds that crime has spiked since the unrest in Missouri because
frontline police officers have been pushed into a retreat.
Accusing
Obama of “attacking the very foundation of civilisation” by giving
credibility to Black Lives Matter, Mac Donald told the conservative
radio host Rush Limbaugh the president had “lied to the nation” and “we
see the results”, apparently referring to the Dallas shootings.
Steve
King, a Republican congressman for Iowa, even claimed the Dallas
shootings were rooted in a seven-year-old row over race prompted when
Obama said a white officer “acted stupidly” by arresting a black Harvard
academic trying to gain entry to his own home.
Obama
had in fact struck a careful balance, stressing that despite legitimate
concerns, American should have an “extraordinary appreciation and
respect for the vast majority of police officers”, describing their job
as dangerous and difficult. He spoke again on Friday after the Dallas
shootings to call the attack “vicious, calculated and despicable”.
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