Spotlight: Racially charged shooting deaths of police hang over U.S. Republican National Convention

While tensions between U.S. blacks and police are still mounting, the shooting deaths of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, seem to have provided more ammunition for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to paint himself as a "law and order" candidate.

However, this spate of violence involving law enforcement is stealing the limelight from the Republican National Convention that opened on Monday in Cleveland in the state of Ohio to nominate the brash New York billionaire developer as the party's standard-bearer to run for the Nov. 8 election.

Republicans gathering at the four-day convention will try hard to pitch the political outsider as a strong leader who can protect Americans from the threat of violence at a time of sensitive racial relations.

Within hours of Sunday's killings in Baton Rouge, an attack apparently targeted at police that came on the heels of a series of police killings of African-Americans, Trump said that "our country is divided and out of control" and that the Islamic State terrorist group was watching as Americans killed police officers.

Trump, 70, has never held elective office before. He cast the recent events as a direct result of the failed leadership of U.S. President Barack Obama and the presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

"How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order," he wrote on his Facebook page.

The Baton Rouge killings came nearly two weeks after the police shooting death of a black man there and another such killing in the state of Minnesota triggered nationwide protests. Earlier, retaliatory violence against police officers in the Texas city of Dallas also claimed five officers.

The recent shootings and the activation of the Black Lives Matter movement, which campaigns against violence toward black people, "work against the Democrats in arousing racial resentment among white voters," said Robert Y. Shapiro, a professor who specializes in political science at Columbia University.

Those events are "more likely than not increasing opposition to the Democrats because they are perceived as not being sufficiently supportive of law enforcement and the police," Shapiro told Xinhua.

On Monday, Clinton, 68, who is poised to clinch her party's nomination at next week's Democratic National Convention, condemned the Baton Rouge killings, the fourth high-profile deadly encounter involving police in the past two weeks, vowing to hold those who killed police accountable.

However, the former first lady expressed empathy with blacks who fear for their lives in encounters with the police, painting Trump as someone who divides the United States along racial, ethnic and religious lines.

"We have difficult, painful, essential work ahead of us to repair the bonds between our police and our communities and between and among each other," she told a largely black audience at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Clinton's campaign strategy is apparently aimed to resonate with her party's voting bases as the black vote was a critical part of Obama's two election victories.

"Most African-American voters will vote the Democratic ticket so Clinton needs to be responsive to those concerns," Brandon Rottinghaus, an associate professor of political science at the University of Houston, told Xinhua.

"Trump's law and order message plays with the voters who worry about such violence spilling into the streets. Trump's inflammatory rhetoric on the subject is easier to rally his base than Clinton's ability to solve the problem adequately," he said.

However, Rottinghaus is cautious in suggesting such violence just played to the strength of Trump. "There will be some effect, mostly manifesting as damage to the Obama administration rather than as a boon to the Trump campaign," he said.

"The events make it look like the Obama administration is less than capable of handling the problems of racial relations and law enforcement," he said. Endi