Obama Has ‘Hard Conversation’ About Criminal Justice Reform with Police Chiefs

President Barack Obama delivered remarks on criminal justice reform and gun control at the Police Chiefs Conference in Chicago on Tuesday. Among his speech’s many points, which included conclusions from his 21st Century Policing Task Force Report and thoughts on the media’s instant response to incidents like the infamous desk flip video, the president took several jabs at congress regarding current legislation on the matter.

“In a hopeful sign, good people in both political parties are actually ready to do something about this. The senate, which basically gets very little done,” said Obama, “voted to move forward on a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill.”

The President continued, “This is not something I get to say very often. I am encouraged by what congress is doing! I hope they get a bill to my desk so that I can sign it, and together we can work to keep reducing America’s crime rate and its incarceration rate at the same time.”

All jokes aside, both lines garnered rounds of applause from conference attendees listening to Obama’s. As did “another hard conversation” that Obama wanted to have, especially since — as he put it — he didn’t have to worry about running for office again.

“As a society we tend to lurch from shock to complacency on these issues. I’m suggesting we have to resist that impulse,” he said. “With today’s technology, if just one of your officers does something irresponsible, the whole world knows about it moments later. The countless incidents of effective police work rarely make it on the evening news, so it’s important for us not to just pounce and jump on anything that happens and immediately draw conclusions.”

Despite insisting on the need to lesson automatic responses to such events, however, Obama concluded by making reference to to several community programs in which citizens teamed up with police to monitor their own neighborhoods, and vice versa.

[Image via screengrab]

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