The gunman who killed five police officers at a protest march had practiced military-style drills in is yard and trained at a private self-defense school that teaches special tactics, including “shooting on the move”, a maneuver in which an attacker fires and changes position before firing again. As CNN reported, Johnson’s Internet history showed he not only visited sites dedicated to the Black Lives Matter movement, the New Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam and the Black Riders Liberation Party – the last two, being labeled hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center – but he also “liked” several of the sites on his Facebook page. We’d talked to the guy.
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They follow videos involving police shootings of black men in Louisiana and MS, and the killing of five police officers by a sniper during an ambush in Dallas. In 1986, Dallas police officers killed or wounded 29 civilians in shootings.
Police killed Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in the Twin Cities suburb of Falcon Heights last week.
Discussions about how to end the standoff took place between those two media updates.
A rally in San Francisco also briefly blocked a freeway ramp, according to local media.
Hundreds of protesters marched from City Hall to Union Square in NY. The crowd swelled to around a thousand people, closing down Fifth Avenue.
Some in the crowd chanted “No racist police, no justice, no peace” as rain fell in NY.
“I didn’t see it coming”, said the 25-year-old’s father, breaking down in tears. Police chief David Brown asked officers to “use their imaginations” to devise a strategy to disable the shooter.
John Fife hands a police officer guarding Jack Evans Police Headquarters a rose in Dallas on Friday July 8, 2016. Rawlings said they had reason to believe he “had the vest on and was mag’d up”, meaning he had plenty of ammunition and possibly was carrying explosives.
A nearby parking lot was searched for a “suspicious person” but no-one was found. SWAT officers were earlier deployed at the main building.
Still he said he understood the questions why non-lethal methods were not used to disable the suspect.
Two patrol cars serving as a memorial outside of police headquarters were adorned with flowers, signs and flags by some of the people pausing to pay their respects to the five officers killed and seven wounded.
To be sure, police relations are far better than they were 30 years ago, when The Associated Press identified Dallas as the No. 1 city for police shootings.
Mr Obama said “it was just not true” the USA was returning “to the situation in the 60s”. Obama is also expected to meet privately with the families of police officers who were killed or injured.
She said the Dallas Police Department has the lead in the investigation and most of the evidence will be turned over to that department. That’s legal in Texas, he said, but once the shooting began, those people “were suspects”.
“We knew we couldn’t arrest our way out of the situation”, said Maj. “I hope that’s not the case, but you’ve got too many people now that are with this extreme rhetoric, and that is just not good for anybody”.
US President Barack Obama, who attended a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit in Poland on Saturday but cut his visit to Spain short by a day, has spoken daily during his trip about the Dallas attacks, calling for police and protesters to “listen to each other”.
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Protesters spoke out against police shootings of black Americans.
