Dallas
The words “Reichstag fire” keep coming to mind.
At least five Dallas police officers were killed and seven others wounded Thursday evening in an attack by snipers in downtown city streets that followed a peaceful protest over recent police shootings. The Dallas police chief said an attacker told authorities “he was upset about the recent police shootings” and “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
The city’s downtown suddenly exploded into violence at around 9 p.m. when gunshots echoed through the streets, sending protesters and police officers alike scattering for cover. Authorities said two civilians were also injured during the shooting.
I can see such terrible possibilities flowing from this.
The police had a long conversation with one suspect before they killed him with a robot explosive.
Before they sent in the robot, Brown said, a hostage negotiator talked to the suspect at length.
In those conversations, Brown said the suspect told police that “he was upset about Black Lives Matter” and angered by the recent police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota that dominated national news this week.
“He said he was upset about the recent police shootings,” Brown said during the Friday morning news conference. “The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
I’m sure Donald Trump will be too grownup and responsible to capitalize on that.
Sarcasm-close-tag.
The incident came on a night when protests raged nationwide over the fatal police-involved shootings of two black men earlier in the week.
On Tuesday morning, Alton Sterling was fatally shot by police in Baton Rouge. Less than 48 hours later, Philando Castile was fatally shot by an officer in Minnesota. Video footage of the killings or their aftermath spread quickly on social media, spurring widespread anger and renewing a debate over race and police departments’ use of deadly force.
As in other cities across the country, protesters gathered in downtown Dallas just before 7 p.m. for a march from Belo Garden Park to the Old Red Courthouse.
For two hours, roughly 800 protesters marched peacefully, chanting and waving signs.
And then at around 9 it all went to hell.
We’re not on a good trajectory here.
America is hopeless.
And where is the NRA to trumpet Stirling and Castile’s ‘2nd Amendment Rights?’
A decade from now, someone is going to be killed by police, because THIS incident will be in the back of their minds. And some policemen will die because the ‘routine’ stop they try to carry out will be with a deranged gun nut raised on Tawana Brawley style paranoia.
A decade from now?? At least 10 years sooner than that.
One of my best friends in high school went on to become a police officer. I haven’t seen him much since our post-college years, but he was motivated solely by a desire to ‘do good’ for the community; raised on comic books, he figured that “police officer” was the closest he was going to get to being a real-life superhero, keeping the public safe. There was no desire for power or authority, beyond what was necessary; he wanted to be a peacekeeper, more than anything.
And every time I hear of an incident like this, I silently hope that he’s safe and doing well (hell, sometimes those silent hopes reflexively take the form of ‘prayers’, since our friendship is from my pre-atheist days, and habits run deep). And I also hope that years of being part of the system haven’t killed that idealism and turned him into one of the ‘good cops’ who look the other way when they see the supposedly rare bad apple do something completely foul. Because short of him being physically harmed, that would be about the worst fate I could imagine for the friend I used to have.
It’s a tragic fact that police work attracts both kinds of people – those who want to protect and help, and those who want to throw their weight around. It’s another tragic fact that doing the job has a strong tendency to nudge people into the second category, for obvious reasons – the police spend much of their time dealing with people behaving badly, and that has its effects.
And a member of my family was the opposite – wanted to be a police man to carry a gun and bully “inferior” people – meaning mostly women and people of color, and particularly his absolutely most hated group – women of color.
Fortunately, he was too out of control for even the police to consider him, and didn’t last very long as an armed security guard; Pinkerton’s got rid of him quickly when he was playing tough man and shooting McDonald’s back fence (he was doing security at McDonald’s). In a large urban area with houses and kids playing in yards on the other side of the fence.
Of course police work attracts people with authoritarian personality types as well as those who want to protect the public, that’s the case anywhere in the world. The lethal difference is that American police are confronted with the West’s most militarised civilian population by far and by higher serious crime rates than other democracies. The implications are obvious. Societies get the type of police force they deserve, and I certainly don’t mean that as a sneer at US police.
There was a report on the BBC that the police at the demonstration had decided not to wear their kevlar vests in order to appear less threatening, that won’t happen again very soon.
America’s racial polarization is now far worse than it ever was during the 60s. It’s going to get very hot this summer.