WARSAW, Poland �� President Barack Obama said Saturday that the shooting deaths of five Dallas police officers, and protests against police killings in Louisiana and Minnesota in Dallas, are not a sign of deeper divisions in the United States.
"Americans of all races and all backgrounds are rightly outraged by the inexcusable attacks on police, whether it's in Dallas or anyplace else," Obama said in Warsaw at the end of a NATO summit. "We cannot let the actions of a few define all of us," he said, calling the attacker in Dallas a "demented individual" without using his name.
For the second time in three days, the president sought to calm a nation that has been jolted by protests over the killing of black men by police. What had been a peaceful protest in Dallas ended in the shooting of 12 police officers on Thursday, an attack Obama previously called "vicious, calculated and despicable."
The president cut his foreign trip short because of the shootings and unrest, deciding to return to Washington Sunday after visiting Spain. He will visit Dallas early next week, with the goal of bridging divisions between police and minority communities, the White House said.
He noted that protests against the police in many cities over the killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota have been "almost uniformly peaceful" and that "you've seen, uniformly, police handling those protests with professionalism."
"You're not seeing riots and you're not seeing police go after" peaceful protesters, he said, drawing a contrast with civil unrest of the 1960s.
The Dallas gunman, Micah Johnson, was a military veteran who told a police negotiator that he was upset by police killings of black men, said Dallas police chief David Brown. After a standoff in which he told negotiators he wanted to kill white police officers, Johnson was killed by an explosive device delivered by a robot.
Authorities said he acted alone. Obama said that it was "very hard to untangle the motives" of Johnson.
Protests over police shootings and racial tension have dogged Obama's presidency. The first black president has said racial tension in the U.S. is rooted in centuries of history, and will take more than one presidency to resolve.
"As tough, as hard, as depressing as the loss of life was this week, we've got a foundation to build on," Obama said.
Obama has launched initiatives aimed at supporting young black and Hispanic males, called for an overhaul of criminal sentencing and created a task force to review police tactics. Some Republicans have called his actions divisive, with a some accusing him of fomenting an anti-police sentiment.
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(Sink reported from Washington.)
