President Obama departed from a prepared speech to make short but impassioned remarks on the Staten Island grand jury’s decision to not indict an NYPD officer who choked a black man to death, calling the decision part of a broader “American problem” and promising to “help solve it.”
The president interrupted remarks at a White House conference on Native American issues to address the non-indictment, which he tied directly to Ferguson. “It’s time for us to make more progress than we’ve made,” he said. “And I’m not interested in talk, I’m interested in action. And I am absolutely committed, as President of the United States, to making sure that we have a country in which everybody believes in the core principle that we are equal under the law.”
President Obama urged the audience to recognize that “this is an American problem, and not just a black problem or a brown problem or a Native American problem . . . When anybody in this country is not being treated equally under the law, that is a problem. And it’s my job as president to help solve it.”
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