President Barack Obama pauses during a news conference ending the second day of the NATO Summit, in Warsaw, Poland, on Saturday. | AP Photo Obama: 'America is not as divided as some have suggested' Speaking in Poland, the president compares 'demented' Dallas gunman to other mass shooters as he defends his previous comments on guns.

President Barack Obama on Saturday insisted that American race relations are not backsliding as the country reels from police-involved shootings in Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas.

“America is not as divided as some have suggested,” Obama told reporters in Warsaw, where he was wrapping up his final NATO summit.


The “demented individual” who killed five police officers in Dallas and injured seven others, Obama said, is “no more representative of black people” than the man who killed nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, is representative of white people.

Obama’s negotiations with European leaders in Poland focused on how the United States and its allies would respond to increasing aggression from Russia, as well as how to conduct the United Kingdom’s orderly exit from the European Union. But Obama is cutting his trip short so he can visit Dallas early next week, and the violence at home — including the deaths of two black men at the hands of police near St. Paul, Minnesota, and in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, documented on smart phones overshadowed the global issues.

“When we start suggesting that somehow there’s this enormous polarization that we’re back to the situation in the '60s, that’s just not true,” Obama said. “You’re not seeing riots and you’re not seeing police going after people who are protesting peacefully. You’ve seen almost uniformly peaceful protests and you’ve seen, almost uniformly, police handling those protests with professionalism.”

The renewed public discord over how police interact with minority communities threatens to be a blot on the last months of the first black president’s tenure. But Obama argued that while the new ubiquity of video clips showing police violence is raising fear, the bias itself isn’t new to the Hispanic and black communities that suffer from it. Obama said he hoped the new awareness would lead to improvements.

Obama said he’d be reconvening the task force he formed to consider better policing practices at the White House next week, and added, “As tough, as hard, as depressing as the loss of life was this week, we’ve got a foundation to build on.”

Obama compared the Dallas attack to other recent mass shootings by gunmen motivated by extremism such as white supremacist movements and the ISIS terror network.

Micah Johnson, the 25-year-old Army veteran behind the Dallas attack, invoked the Black Lives Matter movement, according to local officials. But the issues that the gunman used as “an excuse for his anger," Obama said, in no way represents "what the overwhelming majority of Americans think.”

The danger, the president continued, is when “we somehow suggest that the act of a troubled individual speaks to some larger political statement across the country. When some white kid walks into a church and shoots a bunch of worshipers who invite him to worship with them, we don’t assume that he’s making a political statement that’s relevant to the attitudes of the rest of America, and we shouldn’t make those assumptions about a troubled Muslim individual who is acting on their own in the same way.”

Obama also defended citing guns as a factor in the Dallas shooting.

President Barack Obama addresses the media at the NATO summit in Warsaw, Poland, on July 9. | AP Photo

He sighed heavily as he promised “to keep on talking about the fact that we cannot eliminate all racial tension in our country overnight. We are not going to be able to identify ahead of time and eliminate every madman or troubled individual who might want to do harm against innocent people. But we can make it harder for them to do so.”

Obama noted the high rate of gun violence in Chicago, as well as the fact that a gun was a factor in the death of Philando Castile in Minnesota. According to his girlfriend’s account, Castile was shot during a routine traffic stop after informing an officer that he had a licensed firearm.

In Dallas, Obama said, as officers searched for the source of the sniper’s fire, police had to contend with the fact that innocent people on the scene were openly carrying guns, which is legal in Texas, an open-carry state.

“Part of what’s creating tensions between communities and police is the fact that police have a really difficult time in communities where they know guns are everywhere,” Obama said. “They have a right to come home, and now they have very little margin of error in terms of making decisions.”

He added, ”If you care about the safety of police officers, then you can’t set aside the gun issue and pretend that that’s irrelevant.”

Amid terrorist attacks at home and abroad, as well as the increasing volume of cellphone footage of violent crime and altercations with police, Obama acknowledged “understandable fear” among the public.

But he argued that his administration is making more progress against ISIS than he gets credit for, and that in terms of crime, the country is the safest it’s been in decades.

Obama argued that bombings like those that recently killed hundreds in Baghdad and dozens in Bangladesh reflect the fact that the United States and its allies have exposed the “fraud of the caliphate,” so ISIS is resorting to more traditional terror tactics.

Pointing to military progress in Iraq, he added, “The liberation of Fallujah got lost in the news, but that’s a big town.”

Disturbing as they are, Obama said the “visual records” of the police bias that blacks and Hispanics have long experienced has been helpful.

“The fact that we’re aware of it may increase some anxiety right now and some hurt and some anger, but it’s been said that sunshine’s the best disinfectant,” he said. “It hurts, but if we don’t diagnose this, we can’t fix it.”

Prompted by a reporter, Obama reflected on his broader efforts on race relations.

“More than anything, what I hope is that my voice has tried to get all of us as Americans to understand the difficult legacy of race, to encourage people to listen to each other, to recognize that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination didn’t suddenly vanish with the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act or the election of Barack Obama,” he said. Relations are “substantially better, but we’ve still got some more work to do.”

Obama refused to comment on FBI Director James Comey’s assessment that Hillary Clinton and her staff had been “extremely careless” with classified information, though he did call Comey’s remarks on the investigation “exhaustive.”

“I am concerned,” Obama acknowledged, about the broader information security issues at the State Department that Comey noted. He said that Secretary of State John Kerry is working to find a better way to balance maintaining the fast flow of high volumes of information while protecting sensitive data.