Shooting at Dallas BLM Protest, Multiple Officers Shot

[Alyrium Denryle]

You will cease shitting in this thread.

[Wild Zontargs]

Shooter is identified as Micah X. Johnson, 25-year-old Army veteran with no criminal record and no ties to terrorist organizations.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Is there a reason you did not bother to post the text of the article, but including an image of the suspect from that article, as if it is all the information we need?

I am pretty confident of my ability to infer the reason, but I want to hear it from the horses mouth.

Original story:

A suspect in the Dallas police shooting has been identified as Micah X. Johnson, 25, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday. Johnson was a resident of the Dallas area who had no ties to terror groups or a criminal history. An unnamed law enforcement official told the Los Angeles Times Johnson had relatives in Mesquite, Texas.

Five police officers were killed late Thursday by shooters during a peaceful protest over the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile earlier this week. Dallas Police Chief David Brown said negotiations with one suspect, later identified as Johnson by a law enforcement official, broke down early Friday. After gunfire broke out, a bomb robot was used to kill Johnson.

"He wanted to kill officers. And he expressed killing white people, killing white officers, he expressed anger for Black Lives Matter," Brown said during a press conference.

Brown said police cornered Johnson in a parking garage at El Centro College in Dallas and negotiated with him for several hours. CBS News also confirmed Johnson was the suspect.

"We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was. Other options would have exposed our officers to great danger," Brown said. "He seemed lucid during negotiations."

Negotiations broke down around 2:30 a.m. local time. Johnson told police he was not linked to any groups and had acted on his own. Brown would not comment on the mental health of the suspects in the case. Initial reports had incorrectly stated that Johnson had shot himself. Three other suspects in the shooting were in custody, Brown said.

The shootings in Dallas come after the deaths of Castile in Minnesota and Sterling in Louisiana earlier this week. Both black men were killed by police officers.

President Barack Obama said the U.S. was "horrified" by the shooting of police officers and asked all Americans to pray for the officers and their families.

UPDATE: 11:35 a.m. EDT — The man who opened fire on police Thursday night in Dallas was a U.S. Army veteran, Stars and Stripes reported. Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, said he acted alone when he shot 12 police officers, killing five. He was killed by a police bomb after a violent standoff.

Dallas Police Chief David Brown said Johnson, "did some of the shooting." It's unknown how many other gunmen were involved.

UPDATE: 11:57 a.m. EDT — CBS News said it has confirmed the authenticity of a picture of Micah X. Johnson, the 25-year-old Army veteran who killed five police officers in Dallas during a peaceful protest.

[Wild Zontargs]

Is there a reason you did not bother to post the text of the article, but including an image of the suspect from that article, as if it is all the information we need?

I am pretty confident of my ability to infer the reason, but I want to hear it from the horses mouth.

I summarized the article's new information, included the link to the original (live-stream style updates) article, and included a thumbnail of the shooter's photo. What relevant information that hadn't already been posted did I leave out? Broomstick had already posted the "wanted to kill white people, especially white cops" bit, and in fact correctly guessed most of the details about the shooter. I posted confirmation.

If there weren't several posts full of noise (and a page-break) between my post and Broomstick's, I doubt there would have been any confusion over my reasoning. I guess I should have quoted her post to make it obvious.

[Simon_Jester]

My understanding is that once the shooting started he handed his AR over, and the cops said go home and come on down to the station tomorrow to get it.

Then when he got home they said "errr..can you come on down to the station anyway?"

The impression I'm getting us a cross the T's and dot the I scenario regarding him as a POI.

They can't possibly have done enough of an investigation to reliably identify who is and is not a person of interest. Therefore, "innocent until proven guilty" being a good rule, especially in the early stage of an investigation when everyone is flailing around looking to assign blame and guilt, I'm going to assume he wasn't involved.

Perhaps, I am far too egalitarian in my worldview, but when you do have a situation that effects one particular group more, it goes a long way to highlight how it effects others as well; especially when you are arguing for societal changes. For shits, If 10% (42 million) of the black community suffers at the hands of poor law enforcement while only 1% (240 million) of the white community suffers thats 10 times as many blacks at the short end of the stick. That's 4.2 million to 2.4 million. But that's still over 6 million people. So I would argue that it's of little benefit to dismiss the suffering of over 2 million people...for what exactly?

Excuse me, I'll go fuck off and go be idealistic amongst myself.

Okay, you can tone down the "excuse me for being an idealist" a bit.

Seriously, though, my point is that the belief among blacks that police brutality is a racial issue is justified by the evidence- namely, that said police brutality lands on them like a ton of bricks, while landing on everyone else like "only" a few hundred pounds of bricks.

This is not to say we should ignore or pretend other police brutality exists, but for blacks there is good reason to feel like they, personally, have been singled out and targeted.

There is probably even better reason for them to do so now, because it would appear that a group of terrorists have taken considerable pains to make sure that they are thus targeted.

[cosmicalstorm]

They killed him with a suicide-robot?

I thought it was going to be some nazi who wanted to start the race-war.

[Alyrium Denryle]

They killed him with a suicide-robot?

I thought it was going to be some nazi who wanted to start the race-war.

Yes they did.

That was Option 2, yes. Three options for this shit.

1) Someone for whom frustration at police institutions in the US has reached breaking point
2) Neo-Nazi wanting to kick off the race war
3) Personal killing using collateral casualties to mask motive.

But it seems that the possibilities have collapsed and reality has converged on Option 1

[Crown]

They killed him with a suicide-robot?

I thought it was going to be some nazi who wanted to start the race-war.

Yes they did.

That was Option 2, yes. Three options for this shit.

1) Someone for whom frustration at police institutions in the US has reached breaking point
2) Neo-Nazi wanting to kick off the race war
3) Personal killing using collateral casualties to mask motive.

But it seems that the possibilities have collapsed and reality has converged on Option 1

Why doesn't Option 2 read "Racist wanting to kill people of other races" (which would fit the actual description of police statement of one of the gunmen's statements)?

[Wild Zontargs]

Why doesn't Option 2 read "Racist wanting to kill people of other races" (which would fit the actual description of police statement of one of the gunmen's statements)?

It would also fit his Facebook profile. The thing's full of black militant groups, melanin pseudoscience lunacy, black-supremacist alt-history, etc.
(Screenshot 1) (Screenshot 2) (Screenshot 3)

[The Romulan Republic]

Former Congressman Joe Walsh (no points for guessing his party affiliation) decides to throw fuel on the fire:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... -shootings

Even if you don't live in the Illinois congressional district he represented for a single term, you may have heard of Joe Walsh. It may have been the time he said President Obama won the 2008 election because he is a "black man who was articulate." Or the time the then-radio host was briefly kicked off air for using racial and ethnic slurs on his show. Or the time last night, when he promised "war" and warned Obama to "watch out" after the Dallas shooting.






Update: In an interview Friday morning with the Chicago Tribune, Walsh defended his tweet and said he wasn't trying to incite violence:

"Of course I didn’t mean ‘let’s go kill Obama and Black Lives Matter.’ I was not trying to incite violence against Obama and Black Lives Matter. That’s crazy and stupid and wrong."

He added: "There’s a war against our cops in this country, and I think Obama has fed that war and Black Lives Matter has fed that war. ... Obama’s words and the deeds of Black Lives Matter have gotten cops in this country killed.”

[What we know about the attack on police in Dallas]

Walsh also told the Tribune he's been getting death threats on social media from "the left."

Whether he meant it or not, his latest comments are arguably some of the most controversial in the immediate aftermath of Dallas, so it's worth learning a bit more about him:

The basics: He's held public office only once, though he's run several times. He beat a Democrat to serve in Congress from 2011-2013 in a Chicago-area district that has bounced back and forth in recent years between Republicans and Democrats. He lost reelection to a Democrat and now hosts a conservative talk radio show.

He won his only general election by 291 votes: Walsh's thin win over a three-term Democrat — he beat her by 291 votes without the help of his party — was a surprise. It came during the 2010 tea party wave, when Walsh positioned himself as a conservative, anti-establishment Republican. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, that establishment spent no money to help him.)

He lost reelection two years later in a nasty and expensive nationally watched race against Iraq War veteran Tammy Duckworth. If her name sounds familiar, it's because Duckworth is currently challenging Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) for the Senate seat in what's expected to be a very tough race for the Republican incumbent.


He worked in inner-city Chicago before politics: Walsh taught at inner-city Chicago schools, including teaching high-school dropouts basic life skills, and ran a scholarship fund to pay for low-income Chicago students to attend private schools. Walsh also worked in venture capital, though he told reporters he never made much money.

He's pulled some "outrageous" stunts to get elected: In 1996, when Walsh won the Republican nomination to try to unseat longtime Democratic Rep. Sidney Yates in a neighboring, more liberal congressional district, his campaign grabbed headlines for, in Walsh's words, "some outrageous" stunts.

According to the New York Times, he offered $1,000 for the first person who could spot Yates in the district. He ended up paying Yates's doorman.

He campaigned on a bicycle and carried around an oversize check for $1,000, which he promised to donate to charity if Yates would debate him for an hour.

He also rented a hotel, invited hundreds of people and threw a birthday party for Yates, who was then 87. "The Congressman did not attend," the Times wrote. Yates won by more than 52,000 votes.

The Republican Party wasn't a fan: In that 1996 election, Walsh described himself as "moderate Republican."

"If there's a more gay-friendly Republican around, I'd like to meet him," he said. But when he successfully ran for office 14 years later later, he pitched himself far to the right of the national GOP.

When he won the six-person primary, the House Republicans' campaign arm in Washington told the Chicago Tribune it was essentially giving up on the race. Not even the state Republican Party spent money on the campaign, leaving Walsh badly outspent by his Democratic opponent, Rep. Melissa Bean. Nonpartisan election watchers in Washington ranked the race as "Safe Democrat."

Walsh ended up beating Bean by 291 votes in one of the closest results in the country, no doubt helped by the incredible Republican wave of 2010 that helped the GOP secure its largest post-World War II majority in Congress.


He's no fan of Obama: Almost immediately after arriving in Washington, Walsh started picking fights with Obama.

He posted a YouTube video accusing the president of bankrupting the country. His colorful language made him a favorite of cable news — "the biggest media hound in the freshmen class," my colleague David Weigel, then with Slate, wrote. In a 2011 interview with Weigel, Walsh claimed Obama was only elected president because he is a "black man who was articulate":

Why was he elected? Again, it comes back to who he was. He was black, he was historic. And there’s nothing racist about this. It is what it is. If he had been a dynamic, white, state senator elected to Congress he wouldn’t have gotten in the game this fast. This is what made him different. That, combined with the fact that your profession ... not you, but your profession, was just absolutely compliant. They made up their minds early that they were in love with him. They were in love with him because they thought he was a good liberal guy and they were in love with him because he pushed that magical button: a black man who was articulate, liberal, the whole white guilt, all of that.

He was kicked off air for racial slurs: Walsh's racially driven controversies didn't end with his time in politics. After politics he started a talk radio show, "The Joe Walsh Show," but it was briefly pulled from the airwaves after several racial and ethnic slurs on air during a discussion of the controversy over the team name of the Washington Redskins. Here, via the Daily Herald's Mike Riopell, is what he had to say:

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Walsh is heard questioning why a CNN anchor could use the team name but wouldn't say an offensive term for African Americans.

Walsh repeated the anchor's use of an outdated term for black people and the station abruptly went to a commercial.

After a commercial break, Walsh said he was testing the radio station, using multiple words, and was setting up an offensive term for Latinos when the station abruptly went to commercial again.

Walsh said he was using the slurs to make an example of the media's double standard about what's acceptable to say — and not say.

His financial problems inspired a "deadbeat parents bill": Walsh has also had a series of financial struggles during his time in the spotlight. When he was running for office in 2010, he faced a lawsuit by his former campaign manager for not paying for services. While in office in 2011, Walsh's ex-wife sued him for more than $100,000 in back child support.

Following Walsh's headline-grabbing child support woes, the Illinois legislature debated a bill — dubbed the "deadbeat parents bill" — forbidding people who owe more than $10,000 in child support from running for office.

You know, I really believe in freedom of speech, but tell me again why we can't arrest this shit for inciting violence, terrorism, and treason?

Seriously, I've been reading a lot about the Civil War era lately, and this kind of rhetoric from an elected official seems creepily familiar.

[Vendetta]

So now the po-po have an excuse to kill everyone darker than George Zimmerman even if they are trying to show them the ID demanded by them no matter how day-glow orange or yellow the wallet holding it is. Was really hoping this was some needle dicked white supremacist shit.

They needed an excuse?

[Ralin]

You know, I really believe in freedom of speech, but tell me again why we can't arrest this shit for inciting violence, terrorism, and treason?

Because things like "DECLARED WAR ON X" are very common rhetorical devices and widely understood to not be meant literally. And he specifically said he wasn't calling for violence. Meaning that people who aren't really stupid or looking to grind axes can clearly understand that what he said was not illegal.

Seriously, 'treason'?

[madd0ct0r]

Was this the first exra judicial killing of an american on american soil by a drone?

[Flagg]

They killed him with a suicide-robot?

I thought it was going to be some nazi who wanted to start the race-war.

Yes they did.

That was Option 2, yes. Three options for this shit.

1) Someone for whom frustration at police institutions in the US has reached breaking point
2) Neo-Nazi wanting to kick off the race war
3) Personal killing using collateral casualties to mask motive.

But it seems that the possibilities have collapsed and reality has converged on Option 1

Why doesn't Option 2 read "Racist wanting to kill people of other races" (which would fit the actual description of police statement of one of the gunmen's statements)?

Neo-Nazi's don't have actual grievances. Had neo-Nazis done this, there wouldn't be a presumptive (but let's give positive thoughts against such a situation as I am) tsunami of possible, but I want to believe that the professionalism of the honest with a badge will prevent: harassment, misconduct, and/or Christ forgive violence against some minorities in response to the events in Dallas.

So yeah, apparently they both want the same thing, but one had real grievances not excuses or valid reasons- But grievances.
But if option 2 read as such, it would, from appearances, be accurate.

[Flagg]

Was this the first exra judicial killing of an american on american soil by a drone?

No, and thanks for that. Now I can't be accused of "thread shitting" alone.

And the police have long used robots to negotiate, and I believe they've been used to kill suspects.

[Wild Zontargs]

Wannabe copycat shooter in Tennessee

Cops: Tennessee shooter targeted white victims, similar to Dallas ambush

BRISTOL, Tenn. - The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has released the name of the suspect behind Thursday morning's random shooting in Bristol, TN that claimed the life of an area newspaper carrier and injured three others, including a local police officer.

The TBI says 37-year-old Lakeem Keon Scott was armed with at least two weapons, an automatic-style rifle, a pistol and a large amount of ammunition, reports CBS statation WJHL in Tennessee.

According to the TBI, the victims were:

Jennifer Rooney ( A Bristol Herald Courier newspaper carrier) : Deceased after being shot driving in her vehicle on Volunteer Parkway.

Deborah Watts: In serious, but stable, condition at Bristol Regional Medical Center after being shot while working at the Days Inn.

David Whitman Davis: Received minor injuries at the scene after being injured by flying glass resulting from the gunfire.

Officer Matthew Cousins: Sustained a superficial wound to the leg. Was subsequently treated and released from BRMC.

Preliminary findings indicate Scott may have targeted people and officers after being troubled by recent events involving African-Americans and law enforcement officers in other parts of the country.

Investigators spoke with Scott Friday morning. Agents say "the work to develop a thorough understanding of his motivation for this incident remains central to the ongoing investigative work."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Sullivan County Sheriff's Office, and Bristol Tennessee Police Department are also assisting the TBI with this case.

His Facebook (have a photo) is interesting, too. "Police are the KKK without the hoodies!" and such.

[Broomstick]

They killed him with a suicide-robot?

I thought it was going to be some nazi who wanted to start the race-war.

Replace "nazi" with "asshat" and you've got your bases covered, if he was even thinking that far ahead. Racism and violent separatism is not the sole provenance of white bigots. The black branch of that sort of ideology has been mostly dormant since the 1960's but it never entirely died out.

[Alyrium Denryle]

They killed him with a suicide-robot?

I thought it was going to be some nazi who wanted to start the race-war.

Yes they did.

That was Option 2, yes. Three options for this shit.

1) Someone for whom frustration at police institutions in the US has reached breaking point
2) Neo-Nazi wanting to kick off the race war
3) Personal killing using collateral casualties to mask motive.

But it seems that the possibilities have collapsed and reality has converged on Option 1

Why doesn't Option 2 read "Racist wanting to kill people of other races" (which would fit the actual description of police statement of one of the gunmen's statements)?

Mostly because they are extensionally equivalent. You dont become an <insert race here> supremacist unless one of two criteria are met, generally.

1) Raised in that environment and indoctrinated into it (Son of a KKK member who was son of a KKK member etc etc)

2) Have been shat on long enough to radicalize and direct your ire toward another ethnic group.

Example: A Brand New Neo-Nazi might be a [justifiably] frustrated working class white dude who [unjustifiably] blames his problems on black people and goes off the deep end into tinfiol hat nuttery and racialist ideology. A black supremacist is [justifiably] frustrated with the society that has a systemic racism problem, and [unjustifiably] goes off the deep end into tinfoil hat nuttery and racialist ideology.

The overwhelming majority of black supremacists are in the later category, they are not typically raised in that environment. They find eachother on the internet.

I differentiated that from the Nazis because the Nazis have organizations devoted to that ideology. As far as I know, such things are not nearly as extensive within black supremacy.

[FaxModem1]

This is my home, I didn't lose anyone, but it still stings. The sad thing is that Dallas has been evolving it's police force to be better at dealing with people.

Washington Post

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The Fix
The irony at the heart of the Dallas police deaths after a Black Lives Matter march
By Philip Bump July 8 at 9:25 AM
Eyewitness details Dallas shootings, how he filmed now-viral video Play Video4:00
Kevin Michael Bautista was part of a peaceful protest in Dallas on July 7. When bullets started to fly, he took out his phone and began recording video. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
The first of the two impromptu statements President Obama has offered over the past two days focused on the videotaped deaths of two black men at the hands of law enforcement in Louisiana and Minnesota. While mourning their passing, Obama asked that the country reflect on how we could prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. One way, he suggested, was to implement ideas to improve relationships between the police and communities.

"Last year, we put together a task force that was comprised of civil rights activists and community leaders; but also law enforcement officials. Police captains, sheriffs," he said. "And they sat around the table, and they looked at the data and looked at best practices."

"There’s some jurisdictions out there that have adopted these recommendations," he continued. "But there are a whole bunch that have not."

One of the jurisdictions hailed by Obama's task force was the Dallas Police Department — the same agency that the president would mourn 24 hours later after five officers were killed in a stunning attack in the city's downtown. That attack came at the tail end of a peaceful march organized to draw attention to police use of force.

[509 people have been shot and killed by police in 2016]

In the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the department launched a new tool detailing officer-involved shootings in the department. In a distinct break with the way such incidents are handled in other jurisdictions, the Dallas department identifies not only the number of such incidents but also their locations, the outcome of the incident — and even the names of the officers. Earlier this year, the data provided was made more robust, including other incidents in which force was used.

"We try our best to be transparent," Dallas Police Chief David Brown wrote for the Dallas Morning News after Ferguson, "and I can tell you that not all cops like it. It does open us up to criticism, threats and exposure of every mistake we make. But it’s the right thing to do." The focus of that essay was an officer-involved shooting in the city in 2012, an incident that threatened to similarly spill over into violence but didn't, thanks to the department's focus on transparency.

That focus and the database of information aren't the only changes the department has undergone. The Post's Radley Balko has tracked the evolution of the Dallas Police Department, noting how the agency has focused on use-of-force more broadly. In November, the Morning News explored how the department's training system works, including videos of the program.


One of the more remarkable bits of data in the Morning News's report is this graph, showing a sharp decrease in complaints about use of force by the department. Between 2009 and 2014, complaints dropped 64 percent, as BuzzFeed's Albert Samaha noted on Twitter.

KeXnYNukwerRRFsFdEAJ7GYS
Balko noted at the beginning of last year that the department's reforms also overlapped with a decrease in the city's murder rate in 2014 — though that number jumped in 2015, as it did in other large cities.


At an event on improving policing hosted by the White House earlier this year, Brown presented the department's data on use of force and how it was achieved. But a better example of the department's efforts to build a relationship with the community came from its Twitter account, shortly before Thursday night's attack. This photo of police standing with a protester and smiling is not what you would normally expect to see — particularly given the protest's focus.


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The deaths of his officers doesn't seem to have changed Brown's opinion on how to handle his relationship with the community.

"Police officers are guardians of this great democracy," he said during a news conference on Friday morning. "The freedom to protest, the freedom of speech, the freedom of expression — all freedoms we fight for, with our lives. It's what makes us who we are as Americans. And so we risk our lives for those rights. So we won't militarize our policing standards, but we will do it in a much safer way every time, like we chose to do it this time."

Dallas police chief: 'We risk our lives' to protect American freedom Play Video0:59
Dallas Police Chief David Brown said at a press conference on the morning of July 8 that police officers risk their lives to protect freedom of expression and other rights. (Reuters)
The relationship between Dallas police and the community is hardly perfect, of course. But the ironic effect of Thursday night's murders is that quick assumptions about how they fit into the national debate over police use-of-force obscure a more nuanced and more positive truth.

God, I hate the world sometimes.

[Simon_Jester]

My metaphorical hat is off to Brown if he can stick to his promise not to militarize his policing standards, and to keep doing what he's been doing in terms of making the police relationship with the public less toxic. I'm worried that he may have trouble keeping that promise, but I hope he does.

[Zaune]

Because things like "DECLARED WAR ON X" are very common rhetorical devices and widely understood to not be meant literally.

Tell that to Gabrielle Gifford. The old wartime slogan "Careless Talk Costs Lives" comes to mind.

Not that I believe the man's hasty backpedalling about how he didn't really want to send the heavy mob out to put the blacks in their place, mind you.

[Me2005]

Seriously, though, my point is that the belief among blacks that police brutality is a racial issue is justified by the evidence- namely, that said police brutality lands on them like a ton of bricks, while landing on everyone else like "only" a few hundred pounds of bricks.

Relavent research data by Washington Post on shootings by race, age, armed status, etc.. Draw your own conclusions; it looks like +/-75% of police shootings regardless of race involved a suspect armed with a deadly weapon. I was listening to a radio report today that pointed out that 'unarmed' does not mean 'unarmed and not resisting officers'; it looks like the actual reports are listed below the data points for the options you highlight so you can sort through them easily enough to see how accurate that is though.

They killed him with a suicide-robot?

I thought it was going to be some nazi who wanted to start the race-war.

Was this the first exra judicial killing of an american on american soil by a drone?

No, and thanks for that. Now I can't be accused of "thread shitting" alone.

And the police have long used robots to negotiate, and I believe they've been used to kill suspects.

I'd heard this was the first time that (US) Police have ever used a robot to kill a suspect. And I had also thought I'd heard that the Police used the suspect's own bomb, though reading reports that is not clear at all. They are saying they used the robot to prevent putting more officers in harms way trying to detain him, and it sounds like they did chose to do that rather than something else.

[Simon_Jester]

Seriously, though, my point is that the belief among blacks that police brutality is a racial issue is justified by the evidence- namely, that said police brutality lands on them like a ton of bricks, while landing on everyone else like "only" a few hundred pounds of bricks.

Relavent research data by Washington Post on shootings by race, age, armed status, etc.. Draw your own conclusions; it looks like +/-75% of police shootings regardless of race involved a suspect armed with a deadly weapon.

It is, specifically, the other 25%, plus perhaps a handful of highly suspicious members of the other 75%, that are drawing much of the negative attention here.

I doubt there are very many people at a Black Lives Matter protest who think that if you jump screaming out of a door in front of a policeman, waving your pistol in the air, and get shot, that this constitutes police brutality.

It's the guys who are getting shot without weapons in their hands, in cases where they are portrayed doing physically improbable things, that BLM is getting upset over. "Oh, right, this guy just randomly turned around and charged an armed officer. And THIS guy just inexplicably started talking the neigbhorhood watch guy with delusions of cophood. And THIS guy was trying to break his own neck while being jounced around in your van..."

It is unsurprising that after a pattern of incidents like this making national news, combined with a 'background radiation' of cases of unwarranted police searches, officers arresting blacks for 'looking suspicious' by standing in the wrong part of town, and a steady stream of anecdotal support for the idea that the police are pulling African-American drivers over for 'breathing while black...'

There are fairly obvious and reasonable grounds for blacks to feel like they are being disproportionately targeted, and it is very hard to construct a statistically convincing argument for why they "shouldn't feel that way." Aside from the obvious foolishness of trying to convince a group that they shouldn't feel persecuted just because they're dying more often and being arrested more often.

I'd heard this was the first time that (US) Police have ever used a robot to kill a suspect. And I had also thought I'd heard that the Police used the suspect's own bomb, though reading reports that is not clear at all. They are saying they used the robot to prevent putting more officers in harms way trying to detain him, and it sounds like they did chose to do that rather than something else.

I can honestly sort of see the logic here since this guy was explicitly targeting police officers and had already killed several. That's very unusual, since most criminals aren't actually terrorists trying to kill policemen to make political statements.

[Wing Commander MAD]

Aside from deaths and injuries, this is just throwing fat on the fire. It discredits the BLM movement which, while not an ideal group has some legitimate grievances and leads to asshats making comments about race wars and "punks".

Video of the event shows that those protesting were appalled at the police getting shot and some of the crowd helped the injured. That's sort of the point of these protests: people want the violence and killing to stop, regardless of who is what color or has a particular profession. The people who targeted police just spit all over that idea.

Broomstick, would you care to elaborate on that statement? My first thought would be the lack of any real structured organization beyond a local level, compared to something like the NAACP (at least as far as I am aware), but I would be interested to hear your reasoning since you have most the board's active posters/readers beat on experience and having witnessed/lived through things first hand.

[Pelranius]

I'd heard this was the first time that (US) Police have ever used a robot to kill a suspect. And I had also thought I'd heard that the Police used the suspect's own bomb, though reading reports that is not clear at all. They are saying they used the robot to prevent putting more officers in harms way trying to detain him, and it sounds like they did chose to do that rather than something else.

It is the first time they've used a robots to achieve lethal results in a law enforcement context in the states (don't know about the rest of the world).