WarSclerotic

Obama Pressures Police Leaders To Negotiate With 30 of His Radical Allies

by Neil Munro

14 Jul 2016

Source: Obama Pressures Police Leaders To Negotiate With 30 of His Radical Allies – Breitbart

AP

President Barack Obama pressured a few police leaders to attend a closed-door White House meeting with roughly 30 of his radical left-wing allies, where he pushed for federal rules to govern the nation’s 18,000 police districts. 

In his comments to reporters after the Wednesday meeting, Obama repeated his suggestion that white racism caused the shooting murder of five White or Hispanic police officers in Dallas, and he showed reporters that he’s fully supporting the radical activists’ campaign against the nation’s police leaders. 

“I do not want to gloss over the fact that not only are there very real problems but there are still deep divisions about how to solve these problems,” he told the media. “There’s no doubt that police departments still feel embattled and unjustly accused … there is no doubt that minority communities, communities of color still feel like it just takes too long to do what’s right.”

Obama also claimed that racism explains why young black men are more likely to get shot in disputes with cops than are young white men. “The roots of the problems we saw this week date back not just decades, date back centuries.  There are cultural issues, and there are issues of race in this country, and poverty, and a whole range of problems that will not be solved overnight,” he claimed, despite the growing mass of evidence that young black men are less likely to get shot by cops than are white men. 

Obama’s claim of racism echoes the incendiary statements he made in Dallas to the families of the dead cops.

We also know that centuries of racial discrimination, of slavery, and subjugation, and Jim Crow; they didn’t simply vanish with the law against segregation. They didn’t necessarily stop when a Dr. King speech, or when the civil rights act or voting rights act were signed. Race relations have improved dramatically in my lifetime. Those who deny it are dishonoring the struggles that helped us achieve that progress …

But America, we know that bias remains. We know it, whether you are black, or white, or Hispanic, or Asian, or native American, or of Middle Eastern descent, we have all seen this bigotry in our own lives at some point. We’ve heard it at times in our own homes. If we’re honest, perhaps we’ve heard prejudice in our own heads and felt it in our own hearts.

Obama’s decision on Wednesday to include the Dallas shootings of five cops by an African-American among the “the problems” could indicate Obama is blaming white racism for the decision by an African-American to kill white and Hispanic cops. He underlined that claim of white responsibility for the Dallas murders in a second comment on Wednesday, saying that;

To the American people, I want you to know that this is a pretty representative group of the folks who’ve been involved in the debate in this issue and have practical knowledge and are thinking each and every day about how we can prevent the tragedies we saw in Baton Rouge and in Minnesota and in Dallas. 

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.

Since Obama launched his campaign to federalize police forces, at least 500 additional Americans — including 26 cops in 2016 — have been killed as the nation’s murder rate has spiked. 

Obama invited almost 30 of his racially diverse political allies — including Al Sharpton, one of whose street protesters killed eight people at a store in 1995 — but invited representatives from only a few independent police groups. Two of the outnumbered police leaders at the event were Terry Cunningham, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and Michael McHale, president of the National Association of Police Organizations.

In his brief comments to the media, Obama outlined the ways that he plans to fix the problem of young black men getting killed in stressful confrontations with cops.

Obama did not suggest any compromise or any actions that should be taken by people in African-American communities, which host a greatly disproportionate share of criminal violence in the United States.

For example, he declared that “we’re not at a point yet where communities of color feel confident that their police departments are serving them with dignity and respect and equality. And we’re not at the point yet where police departments feel adequately supported at all levels.” In those two sentence, Obama said the cops must give more “respect” to African-American neighborhoods, but not say that African-Americans should give more support to cops.

The federalization measures that he’s pushing include:

Federally developed “best practices” that would force college-grad cops in 18,000 jurisdictions to robotically follow detailed rules set by lobbyists and “civil rights” lawyers in Washington D.C. — or else face legal and media prosecution.

Federally designed, race-linked hiring rules. That’s the policy in Obama’s adopted home-town of Chicago, where Obama’s political allies have eliminated education requirements to help increase the percentage of African-American cops. Obama didn’t directly call for quota hires, but he called for hiring rules that would help cops gain a “capacity to interact with communities,” which is a euphemism for people from the same community. According to Obama, “one of the themes that came from a number of people is how do we support police officers not just in terms of eliminating bias, but also dealing with the stresses and strains of the job so that they have the capacity to interact with communities and deescalate more effectively.”

Federal training rules that would override local practices. “One of the themes that came from a number of people is how do we support police officers not just in terms of eliminating bias, but also dealing with the stresses and strains of the job so that they have the capacity to interact with communities and deescalate more effectively, and are there ways for us to resource that,” he said. 

Federally-funded software that would allow regulators to track every decision by state and local cops. “Imagine if you’ve got a small county, small budget, they’ve got old computers, they don’t know how to work systems,” Obama said about police officers. “But this is an area where we think we can actually make real progress — is to help departments all across the country to put their data in a way that they can use, but also creates greater systems of accountability and so we [in the federal government] understand what happens.” 

Alongside his focus on getting the nation’s police forces under federal control, Obama did urge his Black Lives Matter allies to rein in their hateful and politically damaging rhetoric. “One of the things that I encouraged everybody here to do was to try to be as thoughtful and respectful outside of this room as folks were to each other during the course of this conversation, because I think the American people would feel more encouraged,” he said.

In the last two weeks, the BLM movement has gotten further out of Obama’s control. Many African-Americans have become very emotional about the issue, so there’s been multiple attacks on cops by BLM supporters, numerous threats and many hateful comments, reviving claims from police leaders that Obama has ignited a “War on Cops.”

That’s a problem for Obama because the hatred and violence may prompt many non-African-Americans, including Asians and Latinos, to back away from Hillary Clinton in her election campaign.

Still, Obama is twisting the knob to 11 in his push to help Clinton get elected.

Obama ended his comments to the media by delivering a threat of continued political and street pressure against the police groups. “I think it is fair to say that we will see more tension in police — between police and communities this month, next month, next year, for quite some time.”

“We have to, as a country, sit down and just grind it out, solve these problems … I think if we have that kind of sustained commitment, I’m confident we can do so,” said Obama, who prefers to create new government rules by forcing major social groups — corporations, unions, cops, progressives — to negotiate closed-door deals that can later be enforced by regulators, or even established in law by Congress. That’s how Obamacare was negotiated before it was sent to Congress for approval. 

No federal legislators or independent media were invited to attend Obama’s closed-door meeting. 

Invitees

The people invited and summoned to Obama’s meeting included a long list of Obama’s political allies, plus leaders of a few independent police groups; 

·         Chief Todd Axtell, Chief of Police, St. Paul, MN

·         Mayor Ras Baraka, Newark, NJ

·         Chief Charlie Beck, Chief of Police, Los Angeles Police Department

·         Governor John Bel Edwards, Governor, Louisiana

·         Cornell Brooks, President, NAACP

·         Judith Brown Dianis, Co-Director, Advancement Project

·         Chief John Carli, Chief of Police, Vacaville, CA

·         Mayor Chris Coleman, Saint Paul, MN

·         Dawn Collins, Community Organizer, Baton Rogue

·         Terry Cunningham, President, International Association of Chiefs of Police

·         Colonel Michael D. Edmonson, Superintendent of Police, Louisiana State Police

·         Chief Dean Esserman, Chief of Police, New Haven, CT

·         Roland Fryer, Henry Lee Professor of Economics, Harvard University

·         Mayor Eric Garcetti, Los Angeles, CA

·         Mica Grimm, Activist, Black Lives Matter Minnesota

·         Reverend Frederick Haynes, Pastor, Friendship-West Baptist Church

·         Wade Henderson, President and CEO, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund

·         Sherillyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

·         Senator J.B. Jennings, Senate Minority Leader, Maryland State Senate

·         Michael McHale, President, National Association of Police Organizations

·         DeRay McKesson, Co-Founder, Campaign Zero

·         Chief Cameron McLay, Chief of Police, Pittsburgh, PA

·         Marc Morial, President, the National Urban League

·         Sam Olens, Attorney General, Georgia

·         Brittany Packnett, President’s Taskforce on 21st Century Policing

·         Jim Pasco, Executive Director, National Fraternal Order of Police

·         Charles Ramsey, President’s Taskforce on 21st Century Policing

·         Laurie Robinson, President’s Taskforce on 21st Century Policing

·         Rashad Robinson, Executive Director, Color of Change

·         Reverend Al Sharpton, President, National Action Network

·         Bryan Stevenson, President’s Taskforce on 21st Century Policing

·         Mayor Tom Tait, Anaheim, CA