President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama stand with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife Akie Abe during an official arrival ceremony at the South Lawn of the White House
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President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shake hands during a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office
First Lady Michelle Obama and Mrs. Akie Abe during a Japanese immersion class at Great Falls Elementary School in Great Falls, Virginia. The Japanese immersion is part of Virginia’s Fairfax County Public School’s World Languages Immersion Program, where elementary students learn math, science, and health through a foreign language
President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe participate in a joint press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House
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President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama welcome Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife Akie Abe after they arrived at the north portico of the White House for a State Dinner
First Lady Michelle Obama is in a Tadashi Shoji dress
President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe participate in a toast with sake during a state dinner
What I am witnessing in my state over the last few days is unfathomable to me. My heart is heavy for the family of Freddie Gray. To bury your son in the morning and then watch your city burn in no small part because of ridiculous decisions being made by an apparently incompetent Mayor and Police Chief has to be heartbreaking. I was 13 years old when DC practically burned to the ground. When MLK was shot and killed all hope seemed to vanish with his murder. People of Color had been suppressed, impoverished and treated as less than human for as long as they had been in this country. First they killed JFK and then Malcolm was taken out and the last person who they had placed their hopes and dreams on was murdered and so they took to the streets and lashed out with anger. My city was in turmoil for 4 days. The National Guard, the Marines and the Army where called in to protect the Capitol and its residence.
I remember how the sky was orange and the haze of smoke with that horrible burning smell lingered for almost two weeks. Can you imagine what it was like for a young girl who had been sheltered most of her life to witness tanks and military guarding our homes for almost a week? It is a memory that will forever be with me. This is why it is so hard for me to understand why police to this day don’t know how to deal with these situations. Closing the transportation that kids use to get to and from school; taunting the protesters by throwing rocks at them; that BS message by the BPD sent to the media that “gangs were going to takeout police” just to justify their response all factor in to what we witnessed yesterday. Now those same gangs that we were supposed to believe were telegraphing the destruction of police yesterday are today calling for peace in Baltimore. You see nothing we are hearing makes a bit of sense.
With respect to Baltimore, let me make a couple of points. First, obviously our thoughts continue to be with the family of Freddie Gray. Understandably, they want answers. And DOJ has opened an investigation. It is working with local law enforcement to find out exactly what happened, and I think there should be full transparency and accountability.
Second, my thoughts are with the police officers who were injured in last night’s disturbances. It underscores that that’s a tough job and we have to keep that in mind, and my hope is that they can heal and get back to work as soon as possible.
Point number three, there’s no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday. It is 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’re committing arson. And they’re destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities that rob jobs and opportunity from people in that area.
So it is entirely appropriate that the mayor of Baltimore, who I spoke to yesterday, and the governor, who I spoke to yesterday, work to stop that kind of senseless violence and destruction. That is not a protest. That is not a statement. It’s people — a handful of people taking advantage of a situation for their own purposes, and they need to be treated as criminals.
Point number four, the violence that happened yesterday distracted from the fact that you had seen multiple days of peaceful protests that were focused on entirely legitimate concerns of these communities in Baltimore, led by clergy and community leaders. And they were constructive and they were thoughtful, and frankly, didn’t get that much attention. And one burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again, and the thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way I think have been lost in the discussion.
The overwhelming majority of the community in Baltimore I think have handled this appropriately, expressing real concern and outrage over the possibility that our laws were not applied evenly in the case of Mr. Gray, and that accountability needs to exist. And I think we have to give them credit. My understanding is, is you’ve got some of the same organizers now going back into these communities to try to clean up in the aftermath of a handful of criminals and thugs who tore up the place. What they were doing, what those community leaders and clergy and others were doing, that is a statement. That’s the kind of organizing that needs to take place if we’re going to tackle this problem. And they deserve credit for it, and we should be lifting them up.
Point number five — and I’ve got six, because this is important. Since Ferguson, and the task force that we put together, we have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals — primarily African American, often poor — in ways that have raised troubling questions. And it comes up, it seems like, once a week now, or once every couple of weeks. And so I think it’s pretty understandable why the leaders of civil rights organizations but, more importantly, moms and dads across the country, might start saying this is a crisis. What I’d say is this has been a slow-rolling crisis. This has been going on for a long time. This is not new, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.
The good news is, is that perhaps there’s some newfound awareness because of social media and video cameras and so forth that there are problems and challenges when it comes to how policing and our laws are applied in certain communities, and we have to pay attention to it and respond.
What’s also good news is the task force that was made up of law enforcement and community activists that we brought together here in the White House have come up with very constructive concrete proposals that, if adopted by local communities and by states and by counties, by law enforcement generally, would make a difference. It wouldn’t solve every problem, but would make a concrete difference in rebuilding trust and making sure that the overwhelming majority of effective, honest and fair law enforcement officers, that they’re able to do their job better because it will weed out or retrain or put a stop to those handful who may be not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
Now, the challenge for us as the federal government is, is that we don’t run these police forces. I can’t federalize every police force in the country and force them to retrain. But what I can do is to start working with them collaboratively so that they can begin this process of change themselves.
And coming out of the task force that we put together, we’re now working with local communities. The Department of Justice has just announced a grant program for those jurisdictions that want to purchase body cameras. We are going to be issuing grants for those jurisdictions that are prepared to start trying to implement some of the new training and data collection and other things that can make a difference. And we’re going to keep on working with those local jurisdictions so that they can begin to make the changes that are necessary.
I think it’s going to be important for organizations like the Fraternal Order of Police and other police unions and organization to acknowledge that this is not good for police. We have to own up to the fact that occasionally there are going to be problems here, just as there are in every other occupation. There are some bad politicians who are corrupt. There are folks in the business community or on Wall Street who don’t do the right thing. Well, there’s some police who aren’t doing the right thing. And rather than close ranks, what we’ve seen is a number of thoughtful police chiefs and commissioners and others recognize they got to get their arms around this thing and work together with the community to solve the problem. And we’re committed to facilitating that process.
So the heads of our COPS agency that helps with community policing, they’re already out in Baltimore. Our Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division is already out in Baltimore. But we’re going to be working systematically with every city and jurisdiction around the country to try to help them implement some solutions that we know work.
And I’ll make my final point — I’m sorry, Mr. Prime Minister, but this is a pretty important issue for us.
We can’t just leave this to the police. I think there are police departments that have to do some soul searching. I think there are some communities that have to do some soul searching. But I think we, as a country, have to do some soul searching. This is not new. It’s been going on for decades.
And without making any excuses for criminal activities that take place in these communities, what we also know is that if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty; they’ve got parents — often because of substance-abuse problems or incarceration or lack of education themselves — can’t do right by their kids; if it’s more likely that those kids end up in jail or dead, than they go to college. In communities where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men; communities where there’s no investment, and manufacturing has been stripped away; and drugs have flooded the community, and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks — in those environments, if we think that we’re just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we’re not going to solve this problem. And we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets, and everybody will feign concern until it goes away, and then we go about our business as usual.
If we are serious about solving this problem, then we’re going to not only have to help the police, we’re going to have to think about what can we do — the rest of us — to make sure that we’re providing early education to these kids; to make sure that we’re reforming our criminal justice system so it’s not just a pipeline from schools to prisons; so that we’re not rendering men in these communities unemployable because of a felony record for a nonviolent drug offense; that we’re making investments so that they can get the training they need to find jobs. That’s hard. That requires more than just the occasional news report or task force. And there’s a bunch of my agenda that would make a difference right now in that.
Now, I’m under no illusion that out of this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities, and so we’ll try to find areas where we can make a difference around school reform and around job training, and around some investments in infrastructure in these communities trying to attract new businesses in.
But if we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It’s just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant — and that we don’t just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, and we don’t just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped. We’re paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids, and we think they’re important. And they shouldn’t be living in poverty and violence.
That’s how I feel. I think there are a lot of good-meaning people around the country that feel that way. But that kind of political mobilization I think we haven’t seen in quite some time. And what I’ve tried to do is to promote those ideas that would make a difference. But I think we all understand that the politics of that are tough because it’s easy to ignore those problems or to treat them just as a law and order issue, as opposed to a broader social issue.
That was a really long answer, but I felt pretty strongly about it.
On This Day: President Barack Obama stretches to shake the hand of a little girl during a U.S. Embassy meet and greet at the Sofitel Philippine Plaza Manila in Manila, Philippines, April 28, 2014 (Photo by Pete Souza)
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Today (all times Eastern)
9:0: The President and First Lady welcome Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Mrs Abe of Japan to the White House; South Lawn
10:0: The President holds a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Abe
12:0: Joint press conference; Rose Garden
7:0: The President and First Lady welcome Prime Minister and Mrs Abe back to the White House; North Portico
8:40: State Dinner
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On This Day
First Lady Michelle Obama watches as students from the Ron Clark Academy perform at the unveiling of the Sojourner Truth bust at the U.S. Capitol in Washington DC, April 28, 2009 (Photo by Samantha Appleton)
President Obama greets various 2009 State Teacher of the Year winners during a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on April 28, 2009
President Obama speaks to employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at FBI headquarters in Washington on April 28, 2009
Students from the Ron Clark Academy perform for First Lady Michelle Obama and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi during the unveiling ceremony of abolitionist and suffragist Sojourner Truth in the Capitol Visitors Center in Washington on April 28, 2009
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President Obama greets workers and invited guests after speaking at POET Biorefining ethanol plant in Macon, Missouri on April 28, 2010
First Lady Michelle Obama jokes with participants in the Wounded Warrior Soldier Ride in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, April 28, 2010 (Photo by Samantha Appleton)
President Obama greets members of the audience following his remarks at the Oakley Lindsay Center in Quincy, Ill., April 28, 2010 (Photo by Pete Souza)
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President Obama talks with Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour about severe storms and tornados that moved across the southeast, during a phone call in the Oval Office Private Dining Room, April 28, 2011 (Photo by Pete Souza)
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President Obama greets cast members from ABC’s sitcom “Modern Family”, including Julie Bowen, center, and Sofia Vergara, right, in the Oval Office, Saturday, April 28, 2012 (Photo by Pete Souza)
First Lady Michelle Obama arrives at the 2012 White House Correspondents Association Dinner
President Obama laughs during the 2012 White House Correspondents Association Dinner held at the Washington Hilton on April 28, 2012
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Children help President Obama to his feet after he sat on the floor to have a group photo with them during a U.S. Embassy meet and greet at the Sofitel Philippine Plaza Manila in Manila, Philippines, April 28, 2014 (Photo by Pete Souza)
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Morning everyone, straight in to Rise and Shine because of the early start at the White House.
The Obama Diary 
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