A Texas congressman told Breitbart News Friday that President Barack Obama should be more careful about his words regarding situations in which there is violence between law enforcement personnel and African-Americans.
“After the shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana–and now with the ambushing of Dallas police officers in my home state of Texas, it is a resurfacing of the problems we’ve seen over the last few years, starting in Ferguson and Baltimore and in various places with the Black Lives Matter,” said Rep. Brian Babin (R.-Texas).
“It is very troubling to know that our police officers are being targeted for absolutely no reason in Dallas, Texas,” he said. “We had Dallas police officers gunned down and killed and wounded in an obviously orchestrated attack–almost military style.”
“I am very disappointed with some of the remarks we have heard from the administration and from the president himself,” Babin said.
Obama arrived in Poland Thursday night and made remarks about African-Americans being targeted by police, not just in Minnesota and Louisiana, but across the country.
“African Americans are 30 percent more likely than whites to be pulled over. After being pulled over, African Americans and Hispanics are three times more likely to be searched,” he said. “Last year, African Americans were shot by police at more than twice the rate of whites. African Americans are arrested at twice the rate of whites.”
The president said incidents of abuse by whites against blacks are not isolated, but rather part of a bigger system of racism inside law enforcement.
“There are problems across our criminal justice system, there are biases — some conscious and unconscious — that have to be rooted out,” he said. “That’s not an attack on law enforcement. That is reflective of the values that the vast majority of law enforcement bring to the job.”
Obama also went out of his way to defend the street activism of African-Americans.
“I would just ask those who question the sincerity or the legitimacy of protests and vigils and expressions of outrage, who somehow label those expressions of outrage as ‘political correctness,'” he said. “I’d just ask folks to step back and think, what if this happened to somebody in your family? How would you feel?”
Babin said he has noticed the president has a nuanced way of making the case against law enforcement and encouraging people looking to stir things up.
“We’ve already seen a couple of incidents over the last few years with the administration, the Justice Department and even the president himself wading off into these incidents, which I think has basically stirred up the problem even more–rather him, if he is not going to say something that puts oil on the water and calms the situation down, for goodness sakes, don’t say anything.”
There is an uneasiness in the land and Americans are losing our domestic tranquility, which starts with law enforcement in our communities, Babin said.
“The American people depend upon our police departments and law enforcement agencies to protect us, and when America doesn’t rally around the ‘men in blue’ there’s going to be a real problem,” he said.
“We have to start protecting and looking out for our own our police departments,” he said. “They are out there putting it on the line for us, just like we do our military. They are here to protect our liberties and our freedoms, our lives and our properties, and you can’t write off these people as all being bad.”
Babin said if there are bad police officers, they should be dealt with, as you would in any other profession. “But, we certainly cannot tar the entire profession of law enforcement with the same brush.”
“We should not allow folks to go out and riot, destroy property and steal and rob and use these incidents as an excuse to do so,” he said. “There has to be law and order and we have to have the leadership to make sure this is not occurring.”
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