Here’s what Obama has really said about the police
Not long after three police officers were shot dead last Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, President Barack Obama condemned the attack.
“For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault,” he said. “These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law, and on civilized society, and they have to stop.”
But his support for the police has not always been taken at face value. Recently, he faced more skeptical questions about his support at a town hall in Washington.
Officers “know you support law enforcement, of course,” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, told Obama at the event. “But do they really in their heart feel like you’re doing everything you can to protect their lives? Words matter. Your words matter much more than mine. Everything you say matters.”
Patrick was only the most recent conservative politician to argue that Obama hasn’t supported police the way he should. “The last couple of years, Barack Obama has done nothing but hate on cops, accusing cops of being bad and racist,” former U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., said on CNN.
Obama has raised deep questions about police shootings of unarmed black men and made a few criticisms of law enforcement. He has pointed, for instance, to evidence that police are more likely to pull over black drivers in the absence of a clear violation of traffic laws, among other broad disparities in the criminal justice system.
In acknowledging these shortcomings, though, Obama has always spoken highly of America’s police. In doing so, he has also offered several detailed arguments for the importance of law enforcement during his presidency.
For example, Obama rebuked advocates for police reform in his speech at a memorial for the five officers killed in Dallas this month. Sometimes, he said, these activists wrongly blame entire police forces for the bad actions of a few.
“The overwhelming majority of police officers do an incredibly hard and dangerous job fairly and professionally,” he said. “When anyone, no matter how good their intentions may be, paints all police as biased or bigoted, we undermine those officers we depend on for our safety.”
Studies of complaints about officers’ behavior filed by citizens support Obama’s argument.
In 1991, an outside commission established to study the Los Angeles Police Department after the beating of Rodney King found that just 183 of LAPD’s 8,500 officers were the subject of at least four allegations of excessive force or improper tactics. The commission faulted superior officers for failing to discipline this group.
Last month, two criminologists published a study of complaints filed by citizens in eight cities: Albuquerque; Charlotte; Colorado Springs; Columbus; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Knoxville; Portland, Oregon; and St. Petersburg, Florida. The study also found that a small group of officers accounted for a disproportionate number of complaints — 79 percent of officers were the subject of one complaint at most. Officers who generated more complaints tended to be younger and less experienced.
Overall, the research does suggest there might be a systemic failure in some departments to address civilian concerns and punish those officers who use excessive force. At the same time, the data also support Obama’s argument about how most individual officers act day to day.
From the president’s point of view, police provide an important public service, one that, like many other public services, was long denied in black neighborhoods.
“Historically, in fact, the African-American community oftentimes was underpoliced rather than over policed,” Obama told the NAACP National Convention last year. “Folks were very interested in containing the African-American community so it couldn’t leave segregated areas, but within those areas there wasn’t enough police presence.”
He might have been referring to the work of 20th-century anthropologists such as Hortense Powdermaker. While the authorities routinely ignored lynchings and other violence perpetrated by white Southerners against blacks, Powdermaker also found Southern law enforcement did not investigate violent crimes among African-Americans.
In other words, the police made less of an effort to seek justice for black victims of crime, regardless of the race of the perpetrator.
“Our entire way of life in America depends on the rule of law,” Obama said in Dallas. “The maintenance of that law is a hard and daily labor.”
In May, Obama’s economic advisers issued a report that discussed the value of police work, offering evidence that the U.S. needs more officers. The report argued that by preventing crime, police bring a range of benefits to the places where they work, benefits that exceed the costs of hiring and equipping the officers.
The report’s authors cited research on legislation President Bill Clinton signed in 1994 that dedicated federal resources to employing tens of thousands of police officers in local agencies. The research suggests those new officers significantly reduced the number of major crimes in the places where they were hired.
The White House report estimates that spending $10 billion to pay and equip more officers would cut the number of crimes nationwide yearly by as much as 1.5 million. The economic benefits of those avoided crimes would total about $38 billion, the report says.
Obama and his aides have been careful to acknowledge widespread concerns about whether police adequately respect civilians’ civil rights. Obama also has noted there is still evidence of racial biases in criminal justice, even if those biases are not always the fault of individual officers. All the same, his rhetoric has been frustrating for critics of U.S. law enforcement.
“When anyone ... paints all police as biased or bigoted, we undermine those officers we depend on for our safety,” President Barack Obama said after the Dallas shootings. JACQUELYN MARTIN ASSOCIATED PRESS