Brown confirmed that Johnson asked during negotiations with police to speak only to an African American negotiator.
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“This wasn’t an ethical dilemma for me”, Brown said.
William Cohen, a former Exponent employee who helped design the MARCbot, said that robot was built to save lives.
“The Dallas Police Department received an anonymous threat against law enforcement across the city and has taken precautionary measures” to heighten security, Dallas police said in an emailed statement.
“What he was doing was righteous and he was going to target law enforcement, make us pay for what he sees as law enforcement’s effort to punish people of color”, Brown said. “We want to be sure to follow every lead and we don’t want to miss any pieces of evidence that might lead to other things that we don’t know yet”, Brown continued.
Police agencies across the US are on edge and on guard after receiving threats and calls for violence against them on social media in the aftermath of the killings of two black men and the sniper attack that left five officers dead in Dallas.
Twenty-one officers were injured in the hours-long melee, including one who suffered a broken vertebrae when a rioter dropped a 25-pound (11-kilogram) chunk of concrete on his head from an overpass, police spokesman Steve Linders said.
He also sang and taunted police during negotiations, asking how many officers he had shot and warned that he wanted to kill more.
“Policing was never meant to solve these problems”, Brown said. While there, the officer spoke to Johnson, who said he “had just gotten out of a class at a nearby self-defense school”.
“As painful as the week has been, I fully believe that America is not as divided as people have suggested”, he was quoted as saying by USA Today on the sidelines of a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit in Warsaw.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown is greeted with a hug at a prayer vigil following the deaths of five police officers during a rally.
Brown said he stood by his decision but understood why questions have been raised about the use of deadly force against the gunman, rather than opting for a non-lethal method to disable him.
The police chief, who has held the position since 2010, originally applied to be an officer while he was in college, watching the crack epidemic destroy his hometown.
The shooter wrote the initials “RB” in his own blood in the parking garage before he died.
Protesters said there is no police accountability, citing the police killing of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota in the past week. “We did damage to him as well”, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said.
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In the wake of the attack, Brown said counseling services is important for his officers.
