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Dallas police ‘improvised with robot bomb’

The Arlington Police Department has offered to work with the Secret Service to provide security during the president’s visit, Brown said.

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Police killed Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in the Twin Cities suburb of Falcon Heights last week.

The police chief in Dallas, Texas has defended his decision to kill a suspected shooter with a bomb delivered by a remote-controlled robot.

“Me and my family have received death threats nearly immediately after the shooting”, Brown said.

The message was hard to read, Brown said, but investigators could make out the initials R.B. They don’t know what those letters mean, but authorities have found clues – supplies for making bombs and a journal at the shooter’s home – that hint at a larger plot against the police.

In a press conference Monday morning, Dallas Police Chief David Brown provided several updates on the shooting, the killing of suspect Micah Johnson and the ongoing investigation.

Brown said he and his family received death threats nearly immediately after the Thursday night attack, which left five officers dead nine others injured.

Twenty-one officers were injured in the hours-long melee, one of them when a rioter dropped a 25-pound chunk of concrete on his head from a bridge or overpass, police spokesman Steve Linders said.

Mr Brown suggested angry young black people in the USA join their local police departments and try to become “part of the solution”. “I didn’t see it coming”, James Johnson, his father, told the website.

At the time of the standoff on Thursday night, Johnson told hostage negotiators that he had been angry about recent fatal shootings of black men by police across the United States and wanted to kill white people, especially police officers, Brown confirmed.

Those people “began to run” when the shooting started, Brown said. Through tears, Johnson says: “I hate what he did”.

Brown emphasized his department’s focus on community policing and cited the city’s 50 percent overall reduction in crime over the past 12 years. He said they improvised the whole plan in about 15 or 20 minutes.

Johnson, who was an Army veteran described as a “loner”, reportedly insisted on speaking with a black negotiator and wrote the letters “RB” among other markings in his own blood on the wall of a parking garage.

He also sang and taunted police during negotiations, asking how many officers he had shot and warned that he wanted to kill more. Law enforcement agencies are now analyzing the contents of the journal.

Military technology expert and author of “Wired for War” Peter Singer told Gizmodo this was the first real instance wherein police used a lethal tactical robot to kill a criminal suspect.

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The shootings took place just a few blocks from where president John F Kennedy was slain in 1963.

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