Obama insists Americans not polarized after recent US shooting deaths
US President Barack Obama has urged Americans not to view the US as divided into opposing groups in a bid to pacify intense emotions after recent killing of five Dallas police officers by a gunman in apparent retaliation for persistent police brutality against African Americans across the country.
"First of all, as painful as this week has been, I firmly believe that America is not as divided as some have suggested," Obama said during a press conference at a NATO summit in the Polish capital Warsaw on Saturday.
"When we start suggesting that somehow there's this enormous polarization, and we're back to the situation in the '60s, that's just not true," He noted. "You're not seeing riots, and you're not seeing police going after people who are protesting peacefully."
The remarks came after five white police officers were gunned down by a black man, identified as former US Army Reserve soldier Micah Johnson, during a protest rally on Thursday.
The march was sparked by the latest shooting deaths of African American men by police in the northern state of Minnesota and the southern state of Louisiana.
Dallas police chief David Brown said Johnson had told a negotiator that he wanted to kill white people, especially white police officers, because he was angry about the recent shootings of black men by police.
Obama, the first ever black president in US history, further stated that "Americans of all races and all backgrounds are rightly outraged by the inexcusable attacks on police, whether it's in Dallas or any place else."
The US president, who is cutting short his European trip on Sunday to visit the city of Dallas, also asserted that Americans are rightly troubled and enraged by the latest police killings of two more unarmed black men and about "the larger, persistent problem of African-Americans and Latinos being treated differently in our criminal justice system."
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