After meeting with police, activists and community leaders for four hours at the White House, President Obama said mistrust and violence between police and minority communities isn’t going away soon, but encouraged all stakeholders to try anyway.
“We have to as a country sit down and just grind it out … solve these problems,” Obama told reporters.
“The pace of change is going to feel too fast for some and too slow for others,” he said. “And sadly, because this is a huge country that is very diverse, and we have a lot of police departments, I think it is fair to say that we will see more tension between police and communities this month, next month, next year, for quite some time.”
Obama acknowledged that widespread agreement on how to address the grievances is fairly elusive.
“Not only are there very real problems but there are still deep divisions about how to solve these problems,” he said. “There is no doubt that police departments still feel embattled and unjustly accused. And there is no doubt that minority communities, communities of color, still feel like it just takes too long to do what’s right.”
Still, Obama ticked off broad areas on which there is consensus: thorough investigations after police use deadly force, better training for police, data sharing among police departments across the nation, and finding ways the federal government can help the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement bodies.
Echoing his remarks at Tuesday’s memorial in Dallas for the city’s five slain officers, Obama said the wave of clashes between police and civilians are the product of systemic problems.
“The roots of the problems we saw this week date back not just decades; they date back centuries,” he said. “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.”
