President Obama said that there is “no excuse” for Monday’s violence in Baltimore and that looting and arson do not make “a statement.”
In lengthy remarks, the president called for police departments, communities and all Americans to do some soul-searching about the motivating factors behind the riots, violence and destruction that broke out in Baltimore on Monday.
“If we really want to solve the problem … it would just require everyone saying this is important and this is significant,” he said at a Rose Garden press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. “We can’t just start paying attention to these communities when a CVS gets burned or a young man is shot or gets his spine snapped.”
The president was quick to say that Americans should not make excuses for violent rioters and looters in Baltimore and other communities.
“There’s no excuse for the type of violence we saw yesterday,” he said. “It’s counterproductive. When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they’re not protesting. They’re not making a statement. They’re stealing.
“When they burn down a building, they are committing arson and they are destroying businesses and opportunities in their communities that rob jobs and opportunities for people in that area,” he continued.
Such behavior, he argued, is not a protest or a statement, but instead is an example of “a handful” of people taking advantage of a situation.
“They need to be treated like criminals,” he said.
In the wake of the chaos and lawlessness on the streets of Baltimore Monday, several presidents of the Urban League and the NAACP issued statement declaring a national crisis when it comes to police killings and other types of brutality of black men.
Critics also blasted Obama for failing to respond more aggressively ever since the death of black Florida teen Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012.
The president, choosing his words carefully, said since the killing of another unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, last year in Ferguson, Mo., “We’ve seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals — primarily African-American and often poor — in ways that raise troubling questions.”
Incidents of police officers appearing to mistreat black men, he said, seem to come up every couple of weeks so it’s understandable why leaders of civil rights organizations and “moms and dads” across the country would say this is a crisis.
But Obama argued that racial tensions, accusations of police brutality and riot outbreaks are “not new” but have been going on for decades.
“This is a slow-rolling crisis — this has been going on for a long time,” he said, attributing newfound awareness of the issue to the influence of social media.
He said the federal government stands ready to work with local jurisdictions across the country to bring about changes to the mentality and the practices of local police departments.
“We can’t just leave this to the police,” he said. “I think there are some police departments who have to do some soul-searching, there are some communities that have to do some soul-searching and Americans have to do some soul-searching.”
“Without making excuses for these communities, when you have children who are born into abject poverty and you have parents who have substance abuse problems…it’s more likely that those children end up in jail or dead,” he said.
“[When you have] no fathers who can provide guidance to young men and communities where there is not investment and manufacturing has been stripped away, the drug industry ends up being an employer for a lot of folks.”
In that scenario, communities can’t just send police in to do the “dirty work,” Obama said.
But unless America as a whole is prepared to stand up and do something to seriously invest in these communities, then it will continue on the same cycle of periodic conflicts and riots in the streets.
“Everybody will feign concern and then it goes away and we go about our business as usual,” he said.
