By Jordan Fabian - 07-09-16 13:08 PM EDT
President Obama on Saturday dismissed the idea that a wave of violence that swept the nation this week is a sign the country is slipping back into painful divisions that have haunted its past.
Despite the shocking killings of police officers and black men, "America is not as divided as some have suggested," Obama said.
"Americans of all races and all backgrounds are rightly outraged by the inexcusable attacks on police, whether it's in Dallas or anyplace else," the president said at a news conference in Warsaw, Poland, where he is attending a NATO summit.
"That includes protesters. It includes family members who have grave concerns about police conduct, and they've said that this is unacceptable," Obama continued. "There's no division there."
The president's comments came one day after presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that "racial divisions have gotten worse, not better" during Obama's eight years in office.
"Too many headlines flash across our screens every day about the rising crime and rising death tolls in our cities," Trump said in a video message.
Obama, however, preached unity in the face of rising anger sparked by the killings of black men at the hands of police in Louisiana and Minnesota, and a massacre of five law enforcement officers in Dallas one day later.
The incidents re-opened a contentious national debate about racial bias in law enforcement and the Black Lives Matter movement.
It also diverted the president's attention away from his final group meeting with NATO allies; it was the third time Obama spoke about the violence on while overseas.
Obama said he would return from his European trip one day early and travel to Dallas "in a few days" to console victims' families and a comfort a community in grief.
The president called it a "tough week" for America, but stressed that the chaos doesn't come close to what the country experienced during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
"You're not seeing riots," he said. "You're not seeing police going after people who are protesting peacefully. You've seen, almost uniformly, peaceful protests and you've seen, uniformly, police handling those protests with professionalism."
Obama said the motives of the Dallas shooter were "hard to untangle." But he called him a "demented individual" and said he did not represent all black Americans, just as a gunman who killed nine last June at a historically African-American church in Charleston, S.C., was not representatives of all whites.
The suspected Dallas shooter, Micah Johnson, allegedly told police he wanted to "kill white people" in the attack.
While the president acknowledged there's disagreement about what lessons the country should learn from the shootings, he urged all Americans to think about how they can make things better.
"We have to make sure that all of us step back, do some reflection and make sure that the rhetoric we engage in is constructive and not destructive," he said.
Obama said he would convene a meeting next week of the White House task force set up after the officer-involved shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
"I want to start moving on constructive actions that are actually going to make a difference because that is what all Americans want."
But the president added that he will continue to lobby for gun control in response to the shootings, even though it's proven to be a divisive topic.
"Police have a really difficult time in communities where they know guns are everywhere," he said. "And as I said before, they have a right to come home and now they have very little margin of error in terms of making decisions."
"If you care about the safety of police officers, then you can't set aside the gun issue," Obama said.
Jessie Hellmann contributed.
- Updated at 2:06 p.m.
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