WASHINGTON, November 26 (Sputnik) – New initiatives will be introduced in the United States to ensure that law enforcement is equally applied to all of the country's citizens, US President Barack Obama announced, amid protests over the case of Michael Brown.
"Next week we will bring together state and local officials and law enforcement and community leaders and faith leaders to start identifying very specific steps that we can take to make sure that law enforcement is fair and is being applied equally to every person in this country," Obama said Tuesday during his speech in Chicago.
"We know that when we have a police force that is representative of the community it is serving, that makes a difference; we know that when there is clear accountability and transparency when something happens, that makes a difference," the US president stressed, adding, however, that police injustice is not an excuse for violence.
"To those who think that what happened in Ferguson is an excuse for violence, I do not have any sympathy for that," Obama said, mentioning, nonetheless, that he was going to work with the Ferguson protesters.
Earlier on Tuesday, US Attorney General Eric Holder said that during his meeting with Obama on the same day they "talked about programmatic initiatives" that they "want to announce relatively soon".
Holder emphasized that the US Justice Department's investigations into the Michael Brown case will continue to be "thorough, they will continue be independent and they remain ongoing. They will be conducted rigorously and in a timely manner, so that we could move forward as expeditiously as we can".
Major protests erupted in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson Monday over the grand jury's decision not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, in Ferguson, on August 9.
