President Obama has tried his best to address the ongoing clash between police and the black community over killings of black men, but more work needs to be done at the local level to build trust between law enforcement and communities around the country, the White House said Thursday.
After being asked about the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in North Carolina, which has sparked protests in the state, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the president “has unfortunately had numerous opportunities to address this topic.”
“What’s clear is there’s important work to be done in local communities all across the country to build trust and strengthen the relationship between local law enforcement and the individuals they are sworn to protect,” he said. “The president has played a leading role in trying to discuss publicly these issues and trying to raise this policy or these policy questions as legitimate priority.”
Earnest said the issue is particularly “complex” because the vast majority of law enforcement officers are “genuine public servants who keep their community safe and put their lives on the line to do so.”
At the same time, he said there are “inequities” in our criminal justice system, “inequities that break down in many cases along racial lines.”
“Those are difficult questions that must be confronted, they cannot be ignored” and the president, he said, has tried to address them and make them a priority.
Earnest cited Obama’s decision after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson to convene a task force on community policing, which recommended that police departments around the country provide more transparency about their activities and arrests.
The president, he said, “continues to believe that [community policing is] in the best interest of everybody — it makes them more effective at doing their jobs and it certainly makes our communities safer, which is ultimately everyone’s goal.”
Earnest initially declined to comment on Donald Trump’s call on Wednesday for the broad use of the controversial stop-and-frisk policing strategy in America’s cities, which involves police confronting people on the street, questioning them and sometimes searching them.
Pressed on what the White House thinks about Trump’s embrace of the confrontational policing method, Earnest dismissed it.
“Stop and frisk is not among the suggestions for obvious reasons,” he said when broadly discussing community-policing methods that aim to resolve trust issues between law enforcement and members of the communities they serve.
