President Trump Decries Violence in Major U.S. Cities Worse Than Afghanistan

July 14, 2020 (EIRNS)—President Donald Trump held a White House roundtable yesterday to highlight the good and necessary work which local police do across the country. Unspoken, but clear from the very human discussion which occurred, is the urgency of the immediate adoption of the policy of physical economic transformation and job creation which LaRouche PAC outlined in its emergency 1.5 billion worldwide jobs program.

Addressing the group, President Trump pointed to the rising numbers of shootings and murders in major U.S. cities: shootings up by 358% in New York City in one recent week, over 300 people shot last month, while New York Police Department retirements quadrupled; murders in Atlanta up 133% over 2019 levels; 105 Americans shot in Philadelphia in the last two weeks; 20-22 people killed and 88 shootings in one weekend in Chicago. “That’s worse than Afghanistan,” Trump said. “That’s worse than any war zone that we’re in, by a lot. It makes them look like tame places by comparison. So we’re not going to let it go on.”

In his short remarks to the roundtable, Attorney General William Barr pointed to the failure of institutions to take on the overall collapse of society which is the driver behind the violence in U.S. cities. Yes, there is room for improvement in U.S. police forces, he said, but

“today, we suffer many unprecedented social ills: kids growing up without fathers; alienated young, angry men; gangs engaged in the most brutal kinds of violence; increasing mental illness and homelessness; and a drug epidemic inflicting casualties beyond anything that we’ve experienced in a major war; and an increase in sexual assaults and child exploitation. You name it. And who is expected to deal with all of this? As other institutions fail and abdicate their responsibility, who is expected to stand their ground and pick up the pieces? The police are.”

Around a dozen Americans from around the country recounted how policemen, on and off duty, had saved their lives or those of their children, or had protected others in the community. Several of the policemen who had done so also spoke, as well as Vernon Jones, an Afro-American Democratic state representative in DeKalb County, Georgia (Atlanta is the county seat), who told of how painful it is to meet with the families of those killed by violence, whether they be police officers or ordinary citizens. He asked for more funding for police officers and for police departments to buy more non-lethal enforcement types of tools.

Representative Jones reminded the roundtable, that “most people, including black people, they want law enforcement to be out there enforcing the law. I think people just want them to be fair. They want them to be swift in justice.” He spoke of the loss of the eight-year-old girl in Atlanta, not to a police officer, but in the protests. “More people have died from the protests of Black Lives Matter than prior to that,” he pointed out. “And so, sometimes it’s hypocritical. It’s almost as if some black lives matter, but all black lives should matter, and all lives should matter. So I thank you, Mr. President, for what you’re doing, and I stand solid with you.”