MURDER CHARGES BROUGHT AGAINST ALL FOUR COPS
As officers at scene of George Floyd’s death face new charges, curfews and protests calling for systemic change continue across U.S. ‘It’s not enough,’ says one protester.
WASHINGTON—“Michelle and I, and the nation, grieve with you, hold you in our prayers. We’re committed to the fight of creating a more just nation in memory of your sons and daughters,” said former president Barack Obama.
“Right now, I think the nation needs law and order,” said current President Donald Trump.
The two U.S. presidents addressed the United States on Wednesday evening in broadcasts less than an hour apart — Obama during a roundtable sponsored by the Obama Foundation, Trump in an interview with his former press secretary, Sean Spicer — and the contrast between the two men could not have been clearer.
In demeanour and tone, of course, that’s always been the case, but Wednesday it was also reflected in the core of the message that each delivered.
Those messages highlighted what has been missing from Trump’s approach and what could offer hope of easing the rage and sorrow that have motivated days of protest and spurred a national crisis.
Obama expressed deep empathy, not just for the family of George Floyd but for others he named who have died from police violence in recent weeks. He tied the ongoing problem of how police treat Black communities to the country’s “original sin” of racism and then proposed ways to achieve “real change” through reforming policing practices.
Trump acknowledged the country might need “healing,” but only briefly, and only after highlighting what he called the “very bad people” who needed to be cracked down upon.
Asked about police reform, he pivoted to attack “Sleepy Joe” Biden for a 44-year political career during which Trump said Biden did nothing to address the problem.
Trump also spent considerable time discussing the incidents of violence among protesters without mentioning the many incidents of violence against protesters by police — except where he approved of it. He criticized the mayor of Minneapolis for crying while discussing the problem.
The focus of Obama’s message — like that of his former vicepresident’s in a speech delivered Tuesday — was on addressing the racial injustice in policing that is motivating protesters. The focus of Trump’s message was the need to police those protesters, and harshly.
The addresses came on a day when protests continued from morning to evening in Washington — around the White House, at the Capitol Building and at Trump’s hotel on the National Mall. Several hundred people paraded through downtown in the 32 C heat of the early afternoon, chanting George Floyd’s name. People in nearby apartments banged pots and pans in support as bystanders on the sidewalk — including security guards outside boarded-up businesses — joined in protest chants.
Authorities had expanded the perimeter around the White House area from the edge of Lafayette Square, which had been the focus of recent days’ protests, to one block north. Throughout the afternoon on 16th Street, where protesters have a view of the White House, the new line was marked not by a fence as it had been at Lafayette Square, but by armed officers. Many of them were wearing no immediately identifiable service uniforms beneath their bulletproof vests.
By early evening, it remained unclear if the plan was to erect a fence in the new location. What was clear throughout the day to John Noakes, an expert on police-protester interaction from Acadia University, was that a heavily armed human barrier was a lot “more volatile” than an inanimate barrier, such as a fence — making conflict between protesters and police more likely rather than less.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited the protests Wednesday afternoon, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren did Tuesday night, both of them highlighting what a different attitude the Democrats have toward to the protesters. They weren’t the only ones. Agrowing group of prominent people — many of them sometime-allies of the president — added their voices to a chorus of disapproval of his approach to the crisis, especially after Monday night’s speech promising to deploy the military to states over governor’s objections and his photo-op visit to St. John’s Church after a peaceful crowd had been forcibly cleared by police to make way for him.
Those critics included evangelist Pat Robertson (“You just don’t do that”), Trump’s former defence secretary James Mattis (“angry and appalled”) and even, to a very mild degree, the current defence secretary, Mark Esper, who caused a fuss when he said the country was not in a situation that would justify deploying the military to cities under the Insurrection Act, as Trump has threatened to do.
Robertson and Mattis both advised the president to offer empathy to the protesters. Mattis said their grievance is justified and needs to be addressed.
That is also the message of Obama — and of Biden, whom the former president risks overshadowing by bringing his political wattage to bear on the question.
It’s possible that, in that calculation, the people around them decided Obama’s voice could actually do some good in helping heal the nation amid the current crisis.
But it’s also possible that any problem of overshadowing Biden is offset by the former president’s message and charisma — and direct engagement with the problem the protesters want solved — which serves to highlight what may be Trump’s deficiency in this crisis.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week showed almost twothirds of Americans said they were sympathetic to the protesters.
Trump’s authoritarian approach appears calculated to project toughness. His opponents are catering to a desire that protesters seem to share with the general public — to address police behaviour.
“We’re committed to the fight of creating a more just nation in memory of your sons and daughters.”
BARACK OBAMA FORMER PRESIDENT