“Our search of the suspect’s home in Mesquite leads us to believe, based on evidence of bomb-making materials and a journal, that this suspect had been practicing explosive detonations and that the materials were such that it was large enough to have devastating effects throughout our city and our North Texas area”, Brown said on CNN’s “State of the Union”. He shut down questions about the wisdom of using explosives to kill Johnson, saying he doesn’t give much credence to sideline critics.
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While a wave of anti-police protests since the 2014 killing of an unarmed black teen in Ferguson, Missouri, has revived memories of 1960s protests over civil rights and the Vietnam War, Thursday’s shooting marked something different: a willingness to take up arms against police.
Since the shooting, police have kept several downtown blocks taped off as a crime scene while they pin down the locations of victims, where officers were when they returned fire and a timeline of Johnson’s movements. Brown said they believe he must have been wounded as he shot his way in to El Centro College where the sniper attacks took place. “And their lives are not at risk”, Mr Brown said.
Brown also revealed that Johnson wrote the letters “RB” in his own blood when engaged in a standoff with police, a mysterious clue that remains under investigation, the Dallas police chief said. “I’ll do it again given the same circumstances”, he said.
Brown said threats were made not only to toward him, but also toward the department and law enforcement officers. Whether it be a few words of encouragement or dropping off cookies or pizza to the station, law enforcement officers throughout the city and suburbs are getting lots of support from citizens.
He also sang and taunted police during negotiations, asking how many officers he had shot and warned that he wanted to kill more.
“We need to figure out a way to ensure that police officers don’t get targeted, because right now they do have targets on their backs”, said Andrea Edmiston, director of governmental affairs for the National Association of Police Organizations, which represents about 241,000 USA police officers.
Communications that came amid the initial chaos of the shooting, as officers huddled behind cruisers and protesters scrambled for cover, indicated that there were multiple shooters.
Two days after the killing of five police officers by a black USA army veteran Micah Johnson during a protest rally in Dallas, a nearby parking lot was searched on Saturday for a “suspicious person” but no one was found.
“We’re convinced that this suspect had other plans”, he added. “It’s their lives that are at stake, not these critics’ lives who are in the comforts of their homes or offices”. Around 50 people were arrested in St. Paul, and officials say 21 police officers were injured.
“We don’t bring them in from Mars”.
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“You have to trust the people whose lives are at stake. $40,000 a year”, he said.
