President Obama has “set this whole country on fire with his race politics,” according to Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke.
Obama “should say nothing,” Clarke, an African American, said during a “Sunday Morning Futures” interview on Fox News. “With what he’s done to set this whole country on fire with his race politics, he should just leave it alone,” Clarke said.
Obama is expected to travel to Dallas this week following the ambush of police officers by a self-described “black nationalist” that left five officers dead and seven wounded. He urged Americans not to impute the attacker’s actions to the black community as a whole and warned Black Lives Matter activists not to make “stupid or imprudent” statements about police.
Clarke said the focus should be on crime in the black community. “What leads to so many interactions of young black males and police in urban centers? It’s crime,” he said. “No one wants to ask, ‘Where are the dads? Where are the fathers?’ Instead, we go after the low-hanging fruit. Too many people want to attack the police.”
Obama addressed the recent violence at length during a press conference in Poland, where he was traveling Saturday for a NATO summit. “We cannot let the actions of a few define all of us,” Obama said. “The demented individual who carried out those attacks in Dallas, he’s no more representative of African-Americans than the shooter in Charleston was representative of white Americans or the shooters in Orlando or San Bernardino were representative of Muslim Americans. They don’t speak for us; that’s not who we are.”
