The growing national divisions over law enforcement and race hardened further on Sunday as police and political leaders condemned the recent killings of five officers in Dallas. One chief referred to Black Lives Matter protesters as “criminals,” while a former D.C. law enforcement leader said the United States is “sitting on a powder keg.’’
Even as people streamed into churches in Dallas and other cities and Americans tried to make sense of the past week of violence, demonstrations again were the order of the day.
Renewed protests over the latest fatal shootings of black men by police took place in Dallas, Baton Rouge, La., and the District, although they remained peaceful, unlike the unrest that erupted late Saturday.
The momentary truce in the nation’s political wars also ended. The White House announced that President Obama will travel to Dallas on Tuesday to speak at a memorial service for the slain officers, but some questioned why the nation’s first African American president was not also visiting Louisiana and Minnesota, where two black men were killed by police last week.
On the Republican side, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump edged away from his earlier calls for unity, blasting Obama and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and tweeting that America is “a divided nation.’
“You can call it a powder keg,’’ Charles H. Ramsey, a former police chief in Washington and Philadelphia, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “You can say that we’re handling nitroglycerin. But obviously when you just look at what’s going on, we’re at a very critical point in the history of this country.”
More details also emerged Sunday about Micah Xavier Johnson, the gunman who shot 12 officers in Dallas on Thursday night before law enforcement detonated a bomb-equipped robot in the parking garage where he had fled.
His rampage, during a Black Lives Matter protest, followed the police-shooting deaths of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn., a St. Paul suburb.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown said Johnson appeared delusional, taunted police during a standoff by singing and “laughing at us” and wrote cryptic messages on a wall with his own blood. He also said Johnson was “determined to hurt more officers’’ and may have been planning a larger attack, citing evidence of bombmaking materials and a journal found in Johnson’s home in nearby Mesquite.
The 25-year-old Army veteran, who served in Afghanistan, “had been practicing explosive detonations” and possessed enough materials “to have devastating effects throughout our city and our North Texas area,’’ Brown told CNN.
The new information about Johnson’s behavior emerged after a tense Saturday night marked by the arrest of a prominent activist in the Black Lives Matter movement and protests in five cities nationwide that resulted in more than 200 arrests, according to activists and police.
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق