President Barack Obama is trying to muffle politically dangerous opposition from police groups to his support for the radical and violent Black Lives Movement — but he’s also insisting to cops that their careers, colleagues and police forces are ‘institutionally racist.’
Obama met with representatives of several police groups at the White House on Monday, just one day before he attends a commemoration — and gives a speech — in Dallas for five cops who were killed by anti-white, racist African-American.
When the police groups told him that he’s not done enough to support the nation’s popular police forces, Obama quickly rejected their criticism, Vice President Joe Biden told CNN. He “talked about [his support]. He gave a list. He said, ‘I’ll be happy to send you all of these statements that I have made,” Biden said. “I don’t think that the [police groups] heard loudly and clearly, that, he in fact has, repeatedly, been supportive of the police organizations,” Biden insisted.
But Obama then told the police groups that they, their members and their police forces are part of a racist law enforcement system, Biden said.
“And he said, ‘But you also have to recognize that there is still institutional discrimination. That doesn’t just exist in policing. It exists in many other areas, hiring, housing, etc. And you’ — and so, then they started talking, and said, ‘Well, maybe we, the law enforcement organization, should reach out and say, look, we understand why you may be concerned about how we deal with you, but here’s — let’s have a conversation, tell us what it is specifically.”
Progressives say ‘institutional racism’ exists when groups and organizations treat members of one racial group differently from another group, because any average differences between groups — in real-estate ownership, hiring rates or criminality, for example — is supposedly caused by racism.
In additional to pushing his planned police takeover of state and local policing, Obama is also federalizing state and city housing rules and rental rules, and is trying to regulate hiring — amid tepid opposition from the GOP majorities in Congress.
But there’s a huge and growing body of statistical and witness evidence that police forces are less likely to shoot blacks than whites when enforcing the law amid disproportionate and growing criminal violence in African-American communities, despite Obama’s repeated claims of racism.
Obama’s accusation of ‘institutional racism’ was not mentioned in the White House’s summary of the meeting.
Today the President and Vice President met in the Roosevelt Room with law enforcement leaders who represent chiefs, sheriffs and rank and file officers across the country. They thanked the leaders for their service and expressed condolences for their colleagues lost in the line of duty.
After that one sentence above about ‘thanks’ and ‘lost colleagues,’ the White House statement included five more sentences about Obama pushing the cops to get on board his step-by-step federalization plan, dubbed the “21st Century Policing Task Force.”
The President and Vice President wanted to hear directly from law enforcement officials about their ideas on best practices for building trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve. They discussed the implementation of the reforms and recommendations laid out by the 21st Century Policing Task Force. They also talked about ways to support officer training in safely deescalating confrontations and systems to ensure the safety and wellness of those who protect all of us. The President recognized the importance of their continued partnership and emphasized his commitment to finding solutions to enhance public safety and reduce tensions between officers and the communities they serve. The Vice President committed to reconvening law enforcement and community leaders for ongoing consultation.
Biden said he would continue to pressure the police groups to accept Obama’s policing rules.
So, it was a real, it’s an overused Washington word, there was real dialogue in there. And so, I agreed to sit with them, with a specific agenda, that they make up over the next ten days, and begin to go through it, as to how — and bring in the community as well.
Obama is also inviting political allies to the White House for a Wednesday meeting to push his federalization plan. On Monday, his spokesman told reporters that;
On Wednesday, the President will convene another meeting here at the White House that will include law enforcement officials, but it will also include activists, academics, civil rights leaders, local political leaders from across the country, to, again, try to further the dialogue and the identification of specific solutions to repairing the bonds of trust that have frayed in so many communities between law enforcement officials and the citizens that they’re sworn to serve and protect.
One participant in the Monday meeting, Jim Pasco, the executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, told Politico that Obama claimed the Dallas killer would have been tried for “hate crimes” if he had survived.
If Obama makes that statement in public, that’s a significant concession because it indirectly describes a black killer as a racist. Many left-wing or progressive groups say African-Americans can’t be described as racist because they don’t have political power, even when the president and the Attorney General are African-Americans.
Pasco told Obama that he “very much” appreciated Obama’s remark, and “at the end of the meeting I asked him to reiterate that publicly,” Pasco told Politico.
But Obama’s support for cops is a pale version of the enormous praise that Obama lavishes on the violent anti-cop movement. At a July 10 press conference in Spain, for example, Obama said the violent BLM movement is speaking “truth to power” and is similar to the 1950s anti-racism movement.
One of the great things about America is that individual citizens and groups of citizens can petition their government, can protest, can speak truth to power. And that is sometimes messy and controversial. But because of that ability to protest and engage in free speech, America, over time, has gotten better. We’ve all benefited from that.
The abolition movement was contentious. The effort for women to get the right to vote was contentious and messy. There were times when activists might have engaged in rhetoric that was overheated and occasionally counterproductive. But the point was to raise issues so that we, as a society, could grapple with it. The same was true with the Civil Rights Movement, the union movement, the environmental movement, the anti-war movement during Vietnam. And I think what you’re seeing now is part of that longstanding tradition.
The public, however, is growing alarmed at the sharp spike in murder rates — which has sent hundreds of Americans to early graves — while Obama and his allies in the Black Lives Matter group mobilize African-Americans voters for the 2016 vote, and also pressure police to reduce law-enforcement in majority-black districts. For example, murder rates in Dallas are on track to double from 2014 to 2016, even as Obama compliments the city’s leaders for embracing his police regulations.
The law enforcement groups at the meeting included the Major Counties Sheriffs’ Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Association of Police Organizations, the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, the Fraternal Order of Police, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Police Executive Research Forum.
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