Shots fired in Dallas, Two Policemen Shot

The last story I saw, ten officers were shot. Three died.

This is from The Guardian in England, and is pretty "up to the minute."

Five police officers have been killed and six more injured after shots were fired during an anti-violence protest in Dallas, Texas, on Thursday evening.
Police have been engaged in an armed standoff with a suspect on a second-floor parking lot close to El Centro College. The suspect has fired at police and claims to have placed bombs in the city. Police chief David Brown said:
The suspect we are negotiating with … has told our negotiators that the end is coming and he’s going to hurt and kill more of us … and that there are bombs all over the place, here and downtown.

Three other people have been detained by police: a woman who was stopped close to the garage, plus two people who were stopped in a dark Mercedes.
Brown said police believed four people had worked together to launch the attack, but he did not speculate on a motive for the shootings. He said the people in custody were not cooperating:
We are waiting for the suspects to break.

One civilian was also wounded: Shetamia Taylor, who was attending the protest with her sons, was shot in the leg but her injuries are not thought to be life-threatening.
Mark Hughes, who was pictured holding a long rifle in a photo circulated by the police department, has been released after turning himself in and is not believed to be a suspect.

30m ago
08:18
Associated Press has this news on Shetamia Taylor, the only civilian reported to have been wounded in the shooting. She was shot in the leg but her injuries are not thought to be life-threatening:

A family member says a protester who was shot when snipers opened fire on police at a rally in Dallas was shielding her sons when she was injured.

A sister of 37-year-old Shetamia Taylor says Taylor was at the protests on Thursday night with her four sons, ages 12 to 17. Theresa Williams says that when the shooting began, Taylor threw herself over her sons. She was undergoing surgery early Friday after being shot in the right calf.

Williams says two of Taylor’s sons became separated from their mother in the chaotic aftermath. She says they’re now stuck behind a police barricade at a hotel near a parking garage where police exchanged gunfire with a suspect.

Texas is a bad state in which to be convicted of murdering police officers.

(Not that there is a good place for that, but they are pretty eager to impose the death penalty in Texas.)


My great uncle shot the county sheriff. But that was nearly 100 years ago. Nothing to do with today.

Thanks for sharing.

It's hard for me to talk about this.
I have compassion for the families of the downed officers.
I have compassion for the two black men killed within 48 hours in very questionable circumstances by cops in Louisiana and Minnesota. I have compassion and empathy for their loved ones.

And I have a lot of anger that the two black men join a long list of black men who died at the hands of police without ever receiving the benefit of a doubt - even after death.

And I have anger, hurt and confusion that seemingly different segments of society only feel comfortable talking either one story or the other - the police deaths or the deaths of the two black men.

I have avoided talking about it because I end up shouting, with stomach acid.

Pal Ryan was just speaking and he lamented the events of this week (his words, not mine) and called for cooler heads. I have not yet heard any mention of tightening reckless handling and proliferation of weapons in the hands of the deranged people.

I'm waiting for the NRA to explain that guns don't kill people, only people kill people. And if the past is any indicator, every yahoo in my county will be lining up at the gun stores to make sure they can acquire another truck load of ammo.

There have been 1500 such instances in the US this year - So a friend tells me.
Whether or not this is accurate (And I see these events as atrocious) - This week's events have certainly overshadowed the Clinton/Lynch saga.
As did the 'Boston-bombing' - The indictment-hearing of Bush, Cheney, Powell, etc.

The shooting of Mr. Castile has been classified a homicide, so maybe there is some hope that there will be change. Not much, though . . . .

I'm willing to talk about both. At the moment I do not think there is enough information to form an opinion about either recent shooting of the two black men. However, both instances are being thoroughly investigated, and I'm sure that if the truth can be determined, it will be.

I know of another case where a privileged white person was killed by the police and the police are covering it up, and there is no federal investigation of that case. So black people don't always get the short end of the stick. Sometimes it can be worse to be the white guy.

I do have some reservations about the BLM movement because so many of the cases that they are trumpeting as murders of innocent blacks are clearly either accidents or justified shootings. However, I do realize that sometimes it is actually murder. I just wish they would be a bit more careful about their facts. I guess I can understand though that with all the injustices against blacks that have gone unrectified, it can be easy for emotions to take over and overrule a dry look at the facts.

I haven't actually heard much about the Dallas shootings yet, but I gather that the suspects are either arrested or are surrounded by the police. And I suspect they face grim prospects in front of a Texas jury. So that case seems to be pretty much all wrapped up except for the executions. Condolences to the slain/wounded officers and their families though.

There are days I wish I never found this forum. I was not expecting breezy off the cuff remarks about death. My apologies to anyone I may have offended. Last night when I saw the "BREAKING NEWS" story, I was shocked that another shooting had taken place. A peaceful protest was being held, no one expected violence, but then the story broke.

There's a tv program called Alaskan State Troopers. Alaska is filled with males that enjoy hunting or target shooting. Some drink to excess. Large Alaskan areas are manned by a handful of troopers. Yet, the troopers are not fearful usually of their lives when approaching a "situation." They are cautious, but mayhem usually does not ensue. Why in the lower 48 does the job of law enforcement appear so different? I could guess that the answers would be offensive to both some law enforcement and some civilians here in the lower 48?

Almost every death at the hands of a police officer is classified as a homicide. It's just they use the qualifier "justified" in front of homicide in almost every case.

It's very difficult for me to see this. Co.prehend it. The fear,a anger people must be feeling. Pain. Today i saw another video. 2 police killed a man who had no defence lying on the ground. Video only just surfaced yet police claimed prior, self defence. They were simply fired. I now hope from this video they get charged.

Apparently, these deaths could have been avoided if only there were some good guys with guns!

Ain't that always the truth?

Mayor Mike Rawlings "I wanna brag..."
Mayor Mike Rawlings "This is what you're risking if you don't do it right..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBm8Ck_V4EU

From what I've seen and read, the police officer who shot and killed Philando Castile in Minnesota seemed to have done so out of fear fueled incompetence rather than deliberate malice. Tragically, Mr. Castille is dead and so the distinction is lost on him, but for the rest of us, the cop's motivation is and should be important.

While there may be a large number of people hoping for evidence that might prove the officer didn't screw up (and really, shouldn't we all hope for that?), I'm pretty sure that the number who hope he skates even if the shooting of Mr. Castille was an act of pure racist hatred, is very small, and so the intro to so many comments on this and similar topics of "If the police officer is found to be guilty of a crime in this shooting he should be..." is unnecessary.

Frankly, I don't know enough of the facts of the Baton Rouge shooting to form even an initial opinion on cause and propriety.

What I do know, is that in both of these cases, millions of people have, once again, rushed to form a conclusion before all of the facts have been gathered and analyzed.

For the average Joe & Jane in America, this is understandable and isn't a violation of anyone's right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. That right only applies in terms of the State's consideration. However, there isn't much that is positive to be gained from leaping to conclusions, and we have seen in the past that what at first blush may seem to be clearly so, frequently is not, and it would be better for the nation and all of us, if we exercised some rational restraint when things like this happen.

But as essentially inconsequential the average citizen's premature judgment may be, the same is not the case for similar and highly irresponsible behavior by our leaders...like the governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton.

Less than 24 hours after Mr. Castille was shot and killed, Dayton decided that the best thing he could do for his State, his State's law enforcement community, and the roughly 5.5 million citizens of Minnesota, was to appear on TV and announce that race surely played a role in this incident, and that if Mr. Castille has been white, he would be alive today.

Political opportunism or sheer stupidity are the only possible reasons for the governor's foolish words. There is no reason to believe that these prejudicial comments likely, or even possibly, averted rioting in one or more of the State's cities. There is no reason to believe that Dayton's words were, in any way, able to alleviate or mitigate the anger and frustration churning in the breasts of African-Americans in Minnesota or across the nation.

Did they contribute to the heinous crimes that occurred that evening in Dallas? That too is highly unlikely, but while neither Minneapolis or St Paul went up in flames that night, Dayton's comments were very much like throwing lit matches at a pile of gas soaked rags. That one of the matches didn't result in the whole pile going up in flames, doesn't make tossing them any less irresponsible, just lucky.

And the need to announce he had asked the Feds to investigate the incident? Where did that come from? How could anyone with law enforcement at the local and State levels not hear that to mean that the governor has no faith in a local or State investigation to be fair and impartial, and if left only to them, the white racist cop who shot Mr. Castille because he was black, would likely get off scot-free.

Somehow the governor was able top conclude that race played a major, negative role in this incident. How? I don't think he personally knew either the cop of Mr. Castille. Was he provided convincing evidence by local or State law enforcement, the same group of professionals he doesn't seem to trust to get the job done? Of course not. He didn't have any information not available to the rest of us, but he did see an opportunity to pander to a constituent group of importance to him.

One piece of evidence that he may or may not have had but which he didn't share during his grandstanding announcement: Mr. Castille was pulled over because the cops thought he looked like a suspect in a recent bank robbery. I've no idea if he did, and I suppose if there was no resemblance at all, the cops might have been guilty of the "they all look alike" racist trope, but that's a stretch and this reason for pulling him over gives lie, at least, to the notion that this cop was out to harass black men and used the busted tail light as a flimsy excuse to bag his prey. It does, though, help explain why the cop was scared witless when he confronted Mr. Castille.

And maybe the cop is a racist and maybe racism was behind the shooting. If so, then the ongoing investigation will reveal it to be the case.

There are bad cops who target African-Americans for unfair and harassing treatment, and whenever a cop kills a black person and there is the sort of evidence found in these two cases, anger, frustration and despair are understandable initial reactions in the black community, but because we can understand where these emotions come from doesn't mean that they should drive the consequences of the incident.

It is a false narrative that every time an African-American is shot and killed by a white cop, the primary motivation is racism, and it is a similarly false narrative that when racism is the reason and murder is the crime, the guilty cop gets off scot-free. While any specific words voiced by Dayton or any other individual in a position power and influence were, almost assuredly not the trigger for the murder of five people in Dallas, the false narratives described above probably played a big role in driving the murderer to a state where he concluded that killing white police officers was the only answer.

And once again we see the double standard of the MSM in operation. A vile, racist creature murders a church filled with innocent African-Americans in Charleston and not only is the NRA at fault (They are always at fault to the MSM and Democrats - just like they are being accused of complicity in the murders in Dallas), but so are Republicans and conservatives.

An equally vile creature, trained by the US government, sets about to shoot and kill as many white cops as he can, and no one (other than the NRA of course,) is to blame. Not BLM and it's supporters, not the leaders throughout the country who rant about deadly, racist cops. No one. The fact that over 100 protesters marched the streets of NYC chanting "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Right now
!." and that similar inflammatory comments are routinely made, didn't influence the Dallas shooter at all. We'll probably never know how much incendiary, anti-police rhetoric influenced the killer, but where are the pundits in the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN and ABC News etc. warning us that insidious rhetoric from the Left has created a toxic environment wherein unbalanced and hate filled individuals act on the cues they believe are being given to them?

When a madman shoots up the political event of a Democrat congresswoman in Arizona, some in the MSM go so far as to blame Sarah Palin's use of target symbols for the violent crime.

When a violent jihadi, in Orlando, murders 49 people in an act of fealty for ISIS, we see and hear accusations that Republicans are to blame because of their opposition to gay marriage.

The examples are numerous and sickening. Anti-cop rhetoric has had a lot more to do with these murders than target symbols and opposition to gay marriage had to do with the others, but it's not even being suggested.

But this is a tired refrain from me and, largely, falls on deaf ears in this forum.

I guess I shouldn't be too hard on Dayton. After all he didn't do anything our president didn't in response to the shootings in Baton Rouge and Minnesota. You would think that after Ferguson and Baltimore that President Obama would have learned that not only should he not be making comments on incidents, still under investigation, that include his conclusions on cause and motivation, but that he's sometimes wrong. A whole lot of people, including Obama and AG Holder, jumped to the conclusion that racist, police brutality was the reason why Michael Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson, MO cop, but after a through investigation was concluded and after riots burned the city and injured people, it turned out they were all wrong.

Thorough investigations of the Baton Rouge and Minnesota shootings are likely to find that unlike the Ferguson incident, these cops were at fault and possibly even motivated by racism, but leaders don't get to dismiss due process and responsible ones don't try and do an end run on it.

WTF? No, Mr Castille did not get pulled over because he looked like a suspect in a bank robbery. Nor was Mr. Castille a member of the Crips gang which is also being reported on White Power sites.

Asking for an investigation into whether race played a part is concluding that it did? That is some pretty sloppy reasoning on your part.

Yes, you can hear that on the video. The policeman is clearly completely panicked. The voice of that guy with his gun still out screaming in terror is just about all you need to hear to understand what happened. But when the governor said that wouldn't have happened to a white man, I believe him completely. In a series of interviews with LA policemen after the Rodney King beating, many of them confessed to be frightened of black men in general. A policeman going into a routine traffic stop being frightened is a scary scenario. And Castile had been pulled over 52 TIMES for various minor violations. I am significantly older than Castile was and I've never been pulled for a equipment violation. My wife drove around town with a burnt out brake light for month and was never pulled. Castile was stopped on average once every four months and his story is not unique. Scared policemen, unnecessary stops, it's a bad combination.


There are videos from I think four different angles showing this incident. You can find them online. They show two policemen tackling a man to the ground, getting on top of him while he is face down, pulling a weapon and shooting him point blank in the back six times then very carefully extracting a gun from his pocket. Louisiana is an open carry state, so the presence of a gun in his pocket is not in itself illegal or unexpected. In the officer's defense, the initial report was that a man with a gun was selling DVD's. Again, I think this is more a case of scared policemen completely unprepared to go into a potentially violent situation. Are these guys open racists? Probably not. Are they acting on racial assumptions and fear? IMO, yes.

This is what we humans do. It takes serious logic to overcome bias. We see cases all over the country of police killing black men and someone out there concludes all police are bad. We see cases of black men committing crimes and someone concludes that black men are criminals. We see Muslims committing terrorist acts and some people decide all Muslims are terrorists. I bring that last one up because if there are 10,000 ISIS followers (that would be higher than most estimates), that is 0.001% of all the Muslims in the world, but you will routinely hear people talking about banning Muslims or subjecting them to significant extra scrutiny. Police kill about 1000 US citizens every year. I'm sure many of those are justified, but enough are not that you have to believe that more than 0.001% of police are bad actors or not qualified to be on patrol. After the Baton Rouge death, I heard one sheepish reporter say "without that video, I'd have reported this as another justifiable police killing of an armed, black man."


But the flip side is also true. A lot of the anger that is driving the current BLM movement is the premature and irresponsible behavior of our leaders... to defend the officer. There will be the infrequent bad actor in the police force, but when those bad actors act badly, they typically walk. Eye witnesses saying the police shot the man in the back, sometimes even video is not enough to get a conviction. After a shooting, the police and press are quick to point out every drug arrest the victim ever had, how his mother had domestic abuse calls to 911, etc. Where are the police investigating bad police and putting them in jail? Where are the DA's pushing for charges? There is a perception that the entire system works one way, perception of innocence for the police, perception of guilt for the dead guy. Someone got killed today. Are the police on it? If the shooter was a policeman, the answer is likely no.

I believe his statement is true. Castile would have not been pulled over, the policeman would have gone into the stop in a fearful state and would have not panicked at that critical moment. Castile would be alive. In order to solve a problem, you have to admit you have one. Starting that process was not opportunism nor stupidity, it was his job as governor. Failing to admit a problem, attributing yet another case of police murder to a one off, a bad actor, a tragic mistake would have been political cowardice.


I believe it does. Were I a black man, I would take great heart that political leaders like Dayton and conservatives like Gingrich and right wing commentators are saying "something is wrong with our policing here". The issue is not so much that police kill people as it is that they get away with it. What happens when there is no video? When people of power speak out, when all people speak out, the drive for a tragic event like Dallas goes down.

What is not a false narrative is that police killings are very rarely prosecuted, even with eye witnesses and video evidence, and on the rare occasion they go to trial, convictions are rare.

The double standard is often shown when the police picture is from his service jacket, showing him smiling in his uniform and the victim's photo is from some party pic he posted on Facebook showing him drinking and acting silly. The narrative is so over the top pro-police it is ridiculous.

Our gun culture (strongly promoted by the NRA) is a big contributor to police fear. In just about every police stop in Louisiana, the police must assume the person stopped is armed. It is an open carry state. The chance for a policeman to make a wrong assumption goes up dramatically when everyone is armed. Guns aren't making us safer and they aren't making policemen safer. Reporters have a duty to report that.