During a press conference with the Japanese prime minister today, Obama called out America for only caring about issues like police brutality when it’s covered in the national media.
Obama had previously given a light touch to directly addressing issues of race and systemic problems with police during his presidency, even holding what many called a “beer summit” with Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a police officer who investigated a possible burglary at Gates’ home when a neighbor called in a black man in the neighborhood. At the time, he called it a “teachable moment.”
In 2012, when unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin was shot by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, Obama took a stronger approach. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids,” Obama said during a press conference at the time. “You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. All of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves.”
The remarks were instantly perceived as divisive, with then-presidential candidate Newt Gingrich saying that Obama cared more about black people than about white people.
Now, following rampant media coverage of the Baltimore riots, Obama addressed race and police brutality at length. What follows is a lightly edited version of Obama’s remarks.
“One burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again and the thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way, I think, have been lost in the discussion. The overwhelming majority of the community in Baltimore handled this appropriately, expressing real concern and outrage over the possibility that our laws were not applied evenly in the case of Mr. Gray and accountability needs to exist.”
“The good news is that perhaps there’s some newfound awareness because of social media and video cameras and so forth, that there are problems and challenges when it comes to policing and our laws are applied in certain communities and we have to pay attention to it, and respond.”
“I think it is going to be important for organizations like the Fraternal Order of Police, and other unions, to acknowledge that this is not good for police. We have to own up to the fact that occasionally there will be problems here. Just as there are in any other occupation. There’s some bad politicians who are corrupt. There are folks in the business community, or on Wall Street that don’t do the right thing, well, there are police not doing the right thing. And rather than close ranks, what we have seen is a number of thoughtful police chiefs and commissioners and others recognize that — get their arms around this thing, and work together with the community to solve the and we are committed to problem.”
“We can’t just leave this to the police. I think there are police departments that have to do some soul-searching. I think there’s some communities that have to do some soul-searching. I think we as a country have to do some soul-searching. This is not new. It’s been going on for decades, and without making any excuses for criminal activities that take place in this community, what we also know is that if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity where children are born in the abject poverty — into abject poverty, they got, parents often, because of substance abuse problems or lack of education themselves can’t do right by their kids. If it’s more likely that those kids end up in jail or dead than they go to college.”
“In communities where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men, communities that where there’s no investment and manufacturing’s been stripped away, and drugs have flooded the community and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks. In those environments if we think that we are 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 are not going to solve this problem 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, then we go about our business as usual.”
“If we are serious about solving this problem, then we are going to not only have to help the police, we are going to have to think about what can we do, the rest of us, to make sure that we are providing early education to these kids. To make sure that we are reforming our criminal justice system so it’s not just a pipeline from schools to prisons. So that we are not rendering men in these communities unemployable because of a felony record for a nonviolent drug offense. We are making investments so they can get the training they need to find jobs. That’s hard. That requires more than just the occasional news report or task force.”
“If our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It’s just it would require everybody saying this is important. This is significant and that we don’t just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns. We don’t just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped. We are paying attention all the time because we consider those kids, our kids, and we think they are important and they shouldn’t be living in poverty and violence. That’s how I feel.”