After two hours of fruitless negotiations with the gunman, Brown asked senior officers to “use their imaginations” to devise a strategy to disable the shooter, later identified as Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, a former US Army Reserve soldier who authorities said embraced black nationalism.
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Micah Johnson, the gunman who killed five police officers in Dallas, showed a noticeable change in behaviour after being discharged from the USA army past year.
Johnson launched the attack during protests over the police killings of Philando Castile, who was fatally shot near St. Paul, Minnesota, and Alton Sterling, who was shot in Louisiana after being pinned to the pavement by two white officers.
“At the scene where (Micah Johnson) was killed, he wrote some lettering in blood on the wall”, Dallas Police Chief David Brown tells CNN in an interview Sunday.
“We’re convinced that this suspect had other plans”, he added.
Authorities do not “have any independent report from an officer saying, ‘I think I hit him,”‘ Jenkins said.
Investigators believe Johnson had been practicing and training for a long time and probably learned of the protest from social media and concluded there would be many police present.
Chief Brown said police were caught off guard when protesters broke away from Thursday’s demonstration, and were thus exposed as they raced to block off intersections ahead of the marchers.
Dallas police confirmed that it received an anonymous threat against the law enforcement across the city and said that the department was taking precautionary measures to heighten security.
Johnson was cornered in a parking garage and killed by a remote-controlled robot’s bomb following a two-hour standoff with police.
Asked what he’d say to demonstrators across the country who took to the streets recently in protest of police shootings of black men, Brown said: “We are sworn to protect you and your right to protest, and we will give our lives for it”.
Johnson, an army veteran who served in Afghanistan, took advantage of a spontaneous march that began toward the end of the protest over those killings.
“If lethally equipped robots can be used in this situation, when else can they be used?” says Elizabeth Joh, a University of California at Davis law professor who has followed US law enforcement’s use of technology. “We’re trying to figure out through looking at things in his home what those initials mean”, Chief Brown said. It was not immediately clear whether Johnson had any specific targets in mind for a larger attack.
The additional details of Johnson’s behavior came after a tense night marked by the arrest of a prominent activist in the Black Lives Matter movement and protests in Louisiana and Minnesota that resulted in more than 200 arrests, according to activists and police.
That, Brown said, is when his officers devised a plan to use a robot to detonate a bomb near the gunman.
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“I can just tell you he was clear of mind, determined to hurt more officers”, Brown said. “We went to his home, we saw that there was bomb-making equipment later, so it was very important that we realize that he may not be bluffing”.
