President Obama Takes A Moment To Discuss Baltimore

“We have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions. It comes up, it seems like, once a week now,” said President Barack Obama today as he spoke on the unrest happening in Baltimore. “We shouldn’t pretend that it’s new. It’s been going on for decades,” he continued.

Today, during his state visit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Ab, President Obama took a moment to offer up words on the situation happening 40 miles away in Maryland. He not only criticized law enforcement, but had a few words for those being destructive in the streets of Baltimore. “There’s no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday,” Obama said. “It is counterproductive. When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they’re not protesting, they’re not making a statement, they’re stealing.” He also said that the actions of those looters are distracting people/the media from the peaceful protests and efforts that have been going on for days. 

President Obama proposes that there be major changes in inner city communities. . “I’m under no illusion that out of this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities,” he says, “It’s too easy to ignore those problems or to treat them just as a law-and-order issue as opposed to a broader social issue.” He also said that it’s important that we don’t just pay attention to these communities when something extreme happens like “when a CVS burns” or when “a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped.” President Obama says he can’t force police departments across the country to retrain their officers, but he can work with them and help pay for body cameras to improve accountability.

“In those environments, if we think that we’re just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there, without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we’re not going to solve this problem,” he said. “And we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets. And everybody will feign concern until it goes away and then we go about our business as usual.”

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