All I’m hearing are excuses and deflection. How about you fuckwads admit that there’s a widespread problem with police overreacting and shooting unarmed, innocent and/or unthreatening minorities? ADMIT THAT THERE IS A PROBLEM SO WE CAN START FIXING IT.
Denial and evasion are nothing but escalation at this point.
Johnson was killed by a bomb-toting robot after conversations with hostage negotiators broke down.
No. Robots are autonomous. A remote-controlled device is a waldo or a drone.
This may seem like pedantic hair-splitting, but as both sorts of devices proliferate in coming years, it will be important to bear the distinction in mind.
Before, during, after…well what the hell do you expect, you’re a black male in TX? They may say it’s about police, but what they really mean is it’s about white police, and you can really drop the police and say it’s about whites. Psst, we all know what it’s about, black or white. We know.
To me theymight of well of said, he was killed via a grenade tossed by officers.
This man is the face of all that’s wrong and all that’s good in the US. Read his life’s story, the death of his son, his brother - it’s all heartbreaking. FFS, we ARE asking too much. The Dallas Police Force is one of the good ones. They have been working with Black Lives Matters, controlling the use of force; they’ve been a model operation. Now, reading the comments before mine, his words ring even truer. He doesn’t have a PhD in sociology, he’s doing everything he can and yet you lay racially motivated killings, nationwide, at his feet.
If we can get BLM allies and the police together, talk about bias & violence as we now have it, as they’ve been trying to in Dallas, end the dumbass open carry laws (I’m thinking SCOTUS) focus our POTUS, we might get somewhere.
Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding. Let the cop handle it. Not enough drug addiction funding. Let’s give it to the cops."
Well this is true and police aren’t the best way to be handling those issues, that isn’t really relevant to the issue at hand which is the lack of accountability on the part of the police when it comes to black men being killed by the police. That accountability can’t be achieved until the police are willing to admit and accept that there is a problem, and deflecting attention to other problems like our county’s handling of mental health and drug addiction, which are problems, doesn’t further the cause of reaching that acceptance.
If I could like this more than once, I would. Well said.
From what I’ve read the Dallas PD is pretty far out in front on a lot of issues around community outreach and policing.
The reason he mentioned the loose dogs problem is because a pack of dogs actually killed a woman in May.
We do ask too much of the police just like we put too much on our prison system. We house psychotics in jails and prisons instead of hospitals. We ask the police to step into every domestic dispute and untangle it when there is violence real or threatened We do put virtually everything that is wrong right on their shoulders instead of dealing with the problems. We expect them to not only fix the problems but to be more than human while doing it.
The conversation is complex. It involved the entire criminal justice system, top to bottom.
If what I read is true, then I’d say the radical groups like the new black panther party need to be brought out into the light for their violent anti-police rhetoric. I don’t want that on “my” side. I understand why people may go into that line of thinking but that doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye to it.
Non-violent speech is the only answer to this issue, unless it is going to devolve into an all-out war… edit: that is, the FULL meaning of “speech” as defined in the first amendment.
Yeah. The twenty seven members of the “New Black Panther Party.” There’s the problem.
Right?
Jeez - I remember the real original Black Panther Party and they were formidable and they did some really cool stuff too.
They had a school breakfast and lunch program for kids at one time that was about the best in the country.
By all accounts I’ve read, this guy is a good chief running a good department. But I don’t think it’s asking too much of cops to ask them to only conduct traffic stops for the purpose of actually enforcing the goddamn traffic laws rather than using it as a pretext to hassle people and to conduct those routine traffic stops without fucking murdering the driver or passengers.
Of course he got death threats. He’s black. He’s a a cop. And he’s tried (and succeeded) to reform policing in his city.
Hate speech is hate speech. It needs to be acknowledged. If there is a peaceful protest, and people espousing these views show up and try to drive any narrative, it shouldn’t be ignored. Extremists are ignored at ALL of our peril.
I absolutely and wholeheartedly agree with him. If looking to shrink police responsibilities will help minimize the militaristic approach to the public, I’m all for this conversation. But that said, none of this addresses the core problem of keeping cops honest and accountable.
Yes we’ve given them a lot of power. But taking that power away is not going to be easy.
O I think everyone agrees with that, including the Dallas police.
I have read in the last couple of days how really heartbroken our African American officers are in Dallas - they feel battered from both directions because they don’t approve of the killings of unarmed African Americans, either.
Agreed. It’s even more impressive when you consider that his police department is in Dallas TX. Not exactly the bastion of liberal policing much less government.
The fact that his officers were there fraternizing with marchers, protecting marchers not just from injury, but protecting their right to protest when that includes protesting the actions OF THE POLICE themselves, is noteworthy.
Nowhere in this article does it say who made the threats. Let’s assume nothing. Certainly not that BLM were the cause, since those on the ground (and in general) are anti-violence.
We need more people like him in charge, not fewer.
“We’re taking them all as credible, whether they can be confirmed or not,”
Because we all know how seriously the police take anonymous threats over the internet.