Confronting another killing of police officers, President Barack Obama on Sunday urged Americans to tamp down inflammatory words and actions as a violent summer collides with the nation's heated presidential campaign. Obama said the motive behind Sunday's killing of three officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was still unknown. It was the latest in a string of deadly incidents involving law enforcement, including the police shooting of a black man in Baton Rouge and the killing of five officers in Dallas. "We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies attacks on law enforcement," Obama said in remarks from the White House briefing room. The president spoke on the eve of the Republican Party's national convention, where Donald Trump will officially accept the GOP nomination. The businessman has cast the recent incidents as a sign that the country needs new leadership, often using heated rhetoric to make his point. Obama said that going into the political conventions, elected officials and interest groups should focus their words and actions on uniting the country, rather than dividing it. "We don't need inflammatory rhetoric. We don't need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda. We need to temper our words and open our hearts ... all of us," Obama said. Meanwhile, US Vice President Joe Biden on Monday described the shooting deaths of three police officers in the Louisiana capital Baton Rouge as a "despicable act" that was an attack on the American way of life. Biden, on visit to Australia, said there was little detail on the latest violence against US law enforcement, which has also been condemned by President Barack Obama. "We don't have the detail yet. We don't know exactly how this occurred, what motive might have been behind it," Biden said in Melbourne where he was visiting a Boeing plant. But he added: "It's a despicable act and it's an attack on our very way of life at home." Biden praised the work of law enforcement men and women, saying they put their lives on the line to respond to such incidents and "we owe them big." "At home, we cannot let others divide us now by making more or this less of this than it is really is," he said. In a new revelation, investigators have said that the man who killed two police officers and a sheriff's deputy in Baton Rouge was a former Marine sergeant who served in Iraq and had no known ties to any extremist groups. Gavin Eugene Long, whose last known address was in Kansas City, Missouri, carried out the attack Sunday on his 29th birthday. Police say he was seeking out law enforcement and ambushed them, wounding three other officers before he was killed in the latest in a string of violent incidents involving police. According to military records, Long was a Marine from 2005 to 2010 and rose to the rank of sergeant. He served in Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009, and records show he received several medals during his military career, including one for good conduct. Long, who received an honorable discharge, was listed as a "data network specialist" in the Marines. After the Marines, he attended the University of Alabama for one semester, in the spring of 2012, according to university spokesman Chris Bryant. University police had no interaction with Long during that time, Bryant said. Oren Segal, director of the Center on Extremism for the Anti-Defamation League, said there was no information linking Long, who was black, to any known extremist group or movement, but the ADL and others were investigating Long's possible use of aliases.
