WASHINGTON — President Obama said Monday he would tighten standards on the use of military-style equipment by police departments, but he stopped short of curtailing the transfer of federal vehicles or weapons to local authorities.
The president also proposed a $263 million program to bolster community-based policing, including $75 million to help provide up to 50,000 body cameras for police officers across the nation.
The video footage from body cameras could clarify disputed incidents such as the deadly encounter in Ferguson, Mo., between Officer Darren Wilson and Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager he killed.
The White House moves came on a day of meetings carefully orchestrated to project a robust response to the unrest in Ferguson after a grand jury’s decision last week not to indict Wilson.
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Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. traveled to Atlanta on Monday to meet with law enforcement officials and community leaders, the first stop on what officials said would be a nationwide tour.
In a speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Holder said he plans to unveil new Justice Department guidelines in the coming days aimed at ending racial profiling and ensuring fair and effective policing.
The president also announced the formation of a task force to improve local policing. Its chairmen will be the commissioner of the Philadelphia police, Charles H. Ramsey, and a leading criminal law scholar, Laurie Robinson of George Mason University.
The White House unveiled the measures after a three-month review of the government’s practice of providing surplus military equipment to state and local police forces.
The president held a series of meetings with his Cabinet, civil rights leaders, law enforcement officials, and others Monday to go over the findings of that review and to discuss the broader mistrust between the police and the public in African-American communities.
But there was no immediate sign that the president planned to visit Ferguson, where a tense calm has prevailed in recent days.
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Across the country on Monday, protesters walked off their jobs or away from school classes in support of the Ferguson protesters. The walkouts, generally peaceful, took place in New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, and other communities.
At the University of Missouri St. Louis, near Ferguson, sophomore Amber Whitaker was among about 30 students who chanted ‘‘Hands up. Don’t shoot!’’ The slogan and a hands-raised pose have come to symbolize the Ferguson protest movement.
Whitaker, who is white, said the symbolism is what matters, not whether Brown literally had his hands in the air when he was shot.
In St. Louis on Sunday, five St. Louis Rams players entered the football field with their hands raised, as a show of solidarity with the protesters.
The St. Louis Police Officers Association said the display by Rams players Tavon Austin, Kenny Britt, Stedman Bailey, Jared Cook, and Chris Givens was ‘‘tasteless, offensive, and inflammatory.’’
Rams coach Jeff Fisher said during a news conference that neither the team nor the NFL will discipline the five players for the gesture. The NFL issued a one-sentence statement Monday from spokesman Brian McCarthy: ‘‘We respect and understand the concerns of all individuals who have expressed views on this tragic situation.’’
The Ferguson Commission, a Missouri state investigative panel that was appointed by Governor Jay Nixon, met Monday for the first time. The 16-member commission will study the underlying social and economic conditions — from failing schools to high unemployment— that have gained attention since Brown’s death.
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The five-hour meeting was devoted primarily to organizational issues. The state panel includes a Ferguson construction-supply company owner, two pastors, a university professor, a community activist, and a St. Louis police detective who is also president of the state chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police.
Nixon dropped plans Monday for a special legislative session to approve additional spending for the state’s public-safety response to protesters in the St. Louis area. The governor reversed course after lawmakers said he could tap into an existing budget for the State Emergency Management Agency to cover the costs of the National Guard and Missouri State Highway Patrol.
After his White House meetings, Obama said he wants to help build better trust between police and the communities they serve and to make sure that military equipment provided to local forces ‘‘aren’t building a militarized culture.’’
The newly announced program to help fund local police departments includes $75 million to help buy 50,000 small, lapel-mounted cameras that would record police actions on the job. Under the proposal, state and local governments would pay half the cost. The FBI estimates there were just under 700,000 law enforcement officers in the United States in 2011.
Brown’s family wants to see every police officer working the streets wearing a body camera. The White House has said the cameras could help bridge deep mistrust between law enforcement and the public.
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The cameras also potentially could help resolve the type of disputes between police and witnesses that arose in the Ferguson shooting. Some witnesses have said Brown had his hands up when he was shot. Wilson said he feared for his life when Brown hit him and reached for his gun.
After its review of the government’s decade-old strategy of outfitting police with military equipment, the White House concluded that the vast majority of these transfers strengthen local policing but that the government should impose consistent standards in the types of hardware it offers, better training in how to use it, and more thorough oversight.
The limited nature of the White House’s response testifies to the reality that transferring military-style gear to police departments remains politically popular in Congress and with the municipalities.
Although Congress held hearings after the initial unrest in Ferguson last summer, it has not acted to curb its grants and transfers of such equipment.
The militarization of the police is part of a broader counterterrorism strategy of fortifying US cities, which took root after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Curtailing the transfers, experts said, would be a reversal of years of policy.
With no legislation on the horizon, Obama has focused instead on standardizing regulations across the federal agencies that supply the equipment to cities and towns.
He will also seek to improve training and require “after action” reports for accidents involving federally funded equipment.
The report, the White House said, found “a lack of consistency in how federal programs are structured, implemented, and audited.” Criticism of the practices swelled after the police, in full body armor and on heavily armed vehicles, confronted protesters with assault rifles.
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But administration officials noted that only 4 percent of the surplus equipment that comes from the Pentagon is actually combat-ready hardware. Most of it is office equipment.
Local departments received about $18 billion in the past five years from five federal agencies, including the departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, and Treasury, plus the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
The report released Monday said that although most of the equipment the programs provide are routine — such as office furniture, computers, and basic firearms — about 460,000 pieces of controlled property have been provided to local police, including 92,442 small arms, 44,275 night-vision devices, 5,235 Humvees, 617 mine-resistant vehicles, and 616 aircraft.
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Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.