Barack Obama trashed the “Defund the police” movement — calling it a “snappy” catchphrase that’s more interested in making people “feel good” than creating change.
The former president sounded off about police reform in two new interviews out this week.
In one, on Snapchat’s politics show “Good Luck America,” Obama was asked if he had words of advice for new-age activists who believe in the “Defund the police” movement.
“I guess you can use a snappy slogan, like Defund the Police, but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,” he said.
He suggested activists take a different messaging approach.
“The key is deciding do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?” Obama said. “And if you want to get something done in a democracy, in a country as big and diverse as ours, then you’ve got to be able to meet people where they are. And play a game of addition and not subtraction.”
In a separate interview with April Ryan, White House correspondent and DC bureau chief for American Urban Radio Networks and a CNN political analyst, Obama discussed the “hot topic” of police reform.
The two-term Democratic commander-in-chief dredged up comments he made in 2009 about the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. — which sent the then-president’s approval ratings on a slide.
Obama, at the time, said he believed police “acted stupidly” by arresting Gates at his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home after the academic was mistaken for a burglar by a neighbor.
“I commented during a press conference … about the fact that ‘Well, you know, I think the Cambridge police probably acted stupidly in arresting somebody in their own home, a 60-year-old man that posed no threat,’” Obama told Ryan in a Monday interview, “And this became a big controversy.”
“Just the fact that I was seen as questioning the police … really upset a bunch of folks and I think it indicated the degree to which the issue of police relations with minority communities, and the black community in particular, is always a hot topic,” he said.
“It is something that unearths or escalates fears within the white population that somehow the African American community is going to get out of control in some way or is not respecting authority.”
Peter Hamby’s interview with Obama aired Wednesday. The three-part series will air through Friday.