Obama voices support for George Floyd protesters and calls for police reform

Former President Barack Obama threw his support behind the efforts of peaceful protesters demanding police reforms during his first on-camera remarks since a wave of protests over the killing of George Floyd convulsed the country and upended the 2020 election.

>> Glenn ThrushThe New York Times
Published : 4 June 2020, 04:03 AM
Updated : 4 June 2020, 04:03 AM

Obama, offering a strikingly more upbeat assessment of the protesters than President Donald Trump and White House officials, said he believed only a “tiny” percentage had acted violently.

“For those who have been talking about protest, just remember that this country was founded on protest — it is called the American Revolution,” Obama said from his home in Washington. He made the comments during an online round-table event with his former attorney general Eric Holder. and activists from Minneapolis sponsored by My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, a nonprofit group Obama founded.

“Every step of progress in this country, every expansion of freedom, every expression of our deepest ideals have been won through efforts that made the status quo uncomfortable,” said Obama, who adopted a conciliatory tone that contrasted sharply with Trump’s tweets and public remarks. “And we should all be thankful for folks who are willing, in a peaceful, disciplined way, to be out there making a difference.”

Obama called on every mayor in the United States to review use-of-force policies and to aggressively pursue an eight-point slate of police reforms that include mandatory de-escalation of conflicts, a ban on shooting at moving vehicles, timely reporting of violent incidents, and prohibitions on some forms of restraint used by the police.

“Chokeholds and strangleholds, that’s not what we do,” Obama said as he sat, tieless in blue shirt sleeves, in front of a bookcase.

He said officials in New York City and Chicago had already agreed to adopt the measures. Other localities, including Atlanta, quickly followed suit.

Obama also said that the “vast majority” of police officers, in his view, were not violent, and predicted many would ultimately support reforms despite the opposition of some unions.

Reflecting on the larger meaning of the protests, Obama said the unrest after Floyd’s death was “unlike anything I have seen in my lifetime” and expressed hope that Americans would be “reawakened” to unite around racial justice.

“In a lot of ways, what has happened in the last several weeks is that challenges and structural problems here in the United States have been thrown into high relief,” he said. “They are the outcome of not just an immediate moment in time, but as the result of a long host of things — slavery, Jim Crow, redlining and institutional racism.”

With the exception of his support for protesters, Obama confined his remarks to the issues of policing and racial disparities in health care during the coronavirus pandemic that have led to higher rates of infection and death in non-white communities.

Obama, as he often does, tried to avoid a one-on-one battle with his successor, a fight he thinks will energise the president’s conservative base and overshadow his friend Joe Biden, the Democrats’ presumptive nominee.

Obama did not directly address Trump’s bellicose comments or the president’s demand that the authorities “dominate” protesters, although people close to the former president said he was outraged by the use of chemical spray on protesters before Trump walked to a fire-damaged church near the White House and brandished a Bible.

Instead, Obama expressed optimism that the reform effort could transcend political divisions. He said that he was heartened by polls showing broad support for their grievances, and that this made the current situation more heartening than the protests in the late 1960s.

Obama’s remarks tracked closely with two essays he posted online over the last week in which he implored young protesters to channel their rage into political action by turning out for Biden in November and to embrace local reforms to hold police officers accountable for abuses of power.

“We should be fighting to make sure that we have a president, a Congress, a US Justice Department, and a federal judiciary that actually recognise the ongoing, corrosive role that racism plays in our society and want to do something about it,” he wrote in a post on Medium on Monday.

In recent appearances, Obama has become more forceful in his criticism of the White House, hammering Trump’s actions without invoking his successor’s name. Obama rebuked the current administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic as “chaotic” and questioned Trump’s commitment to the “rule of law” in a call with former members of his White House team last month.

For all his outward calm, Obama’s passions are running high, and the disciplined former president is finding it harder to stay on script, friends said. Over the past few days, he has been working the phones with close associates, including Holder, venting his disgust at the White House’s response to the protests and strategising about the best way to address the issues without inflaming the crisis or squaring off into a one-on-one fight with Trump, people close to him said.

On Tuesday, a Minneapolis radio station reported that Secret Service officials were making preliminary preparations for a high-level visitor, perhaps Obama. But people close to the former president said he had no intention of traveling there this week — although they did not rule out Obama’s participation in related events in the future.

Shortly before Obama spoke Wednesday, former President Jimmy Carter issued a statement calling for peaceful protest and systemic change. “As a white male of the South, I know all too well the impact of segregation and injustice to African Americans,” the 95-year-old former president wrote. “We need a government as good as its people, and we are better than this.”

Those comments came a day after another former president also presented an alternative vision of the protests to Trump. In a lengthy statement, former President George W Bush expressed solidarity with the demonstrators in the streets and, without naming the incumbent president, warned against trying to suppress their protests.

“It is a strength when protesters, protected by responsible law enforcement, march for a better future,” Bush said Tuesday. “This tragedy — in a long series of similar tragedies — raises a long overdue question: How do we end systemic racism in our society? The only way to see ourselves in a true light is to listen to the voices of so many who are hurting and grieving.”

Bush, the only living Republican former president — and one who refused to vote for Trump in 2016 — made no direct reference to the current president or his recent threats to use the military to dominate and deter protesters. But Bush spoke after Trump’s photo op havoc, and the former president’s comments read like a rebuke.

“Those who set out to silence those voices,” Bush said, “do not understand the meaning of America — or how it becomes a better place.”

Obama struck a similar tone Wednesday, saying the overall message of the protests was simple, admirable and unifying:

“See me, I’m human,” he said.

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