America
Obama says there's no excuse for criminal acts at Ferguson
Washington, March 13
President Barack
Obama has said there was "no excuse for criminal acts" at Ferguson,
where two policemen were wounded in a shooting Wednesday night.
"Whoever
fired those shots...they're criminals, they need to be arrested," Obama
said during an interview on the ABC programme "Jimmy Kimmel Live" on
Thursday.
"And then what we need to do is make sure that
like-minded, good-spirited people on both sides -- law enforcement, who
have a terrifically tough job, and people who understandably don't want
to be stopped and harassed just because of their race -- that they are
able to work together to come up with some good answers," he said.
Obama
reacted with those words after the shooting that left two police
officers wounded in St. Louis County, where Ferguson is located, during a
street protest by dozens of people in front of the city's police
department.
"What we have to make sure of is that the folks who
disregard and disrespect the other side, people who resort to violence,
that they're marginalised," the president said.
The Ferguson
shooting came after the resignation that same day of the local chief of
police, Thomas Jackson, and two other high municipal officials as a
result of the justice department's report that, Obama noted, it had
found a "whole structure" that indicated "both racism and just a
disregard for what law enforcement is supposed to do".
Ferguson
is where unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot dead by a white
police officer last August in an incident that sparked a wave of
disturbances all across the country.
Jackson's resignation was one of the chief demands of the Ferguson protests after Brown was killed.
A
report by the justice department published last week questioned the
practices both of police and justice authorities in Ferguson.
US
Attorney General Eric Holder said the Department of Justice will use its
authority to reform the Ferguson police department, going so far as to
dismantle it entirely if that should prove necessary.
In its
report, the justice department accused the Ferguson police of
systematically violating the civil rights of the town's black residents,
with arrests for no apparent reason and the excessive use of force,
above all against that community.
The federal investigation
revealed that over the past two years, African-American citizens of the
city, which amounts to 67 percent of the population, were the object of
85 percent of traffic stops, 93 percent of arrests and 88 percent of
cases in which police used force.