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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