One thing's certain about Thursday's tragedy: Officers of the Dallas Police Department and the Dallas Area Rapid Transit authority had nothing to do with the recent deaths of two young black men, one in Louisiana and another in Minnesota.
"One of the terrible things about this is that Dallas is one of the most progressive police departments in the country," Rita Sklar of the Arkansas Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said in a telephone interview Friday morning. As an institution, the Dallas police are at the forefront of efforts to bring down the number of questionable deaths in police custody nationwide, she said.
Yet at least one madman with a gun assassinated five officers at random in a broad-brush act of hatred. The attack wounded another seven police and two civilians. The victims were shot in retaliation against police in general during a peaceful protest mourning those two earlier deaths in other states.
Five officers are dead only because their killer or killers happened to live in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area. According to the Dallas Morning News, the city police officers slain are: Senior Cpl. Lorne Ahrens, 48; Officer Michael Krol, 40; Sgt. Michael J. Smith, 55; and Officer Patrick Zamarripa, an Iraq War veteran whose age was not given. The DART officer -- the first of that agency to die in the line of duty -- was Brent Thompson, 43.
Just hours before this shooting began, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee -- again -- blocked two amendments to allow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study gun-related deaths. The effective ban has been in place since 1997. Arkansas has the unfortunate distinction of having the "Dickey amendment" banning such research named after one of our own, former Rep. Jay Dickey of Pine Bluff. Dickey himself has publicly called for the repeal of the ban since 2012.
Last month, Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., sent off a letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking for some news -- any news -- of progress under the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013. Readers with long memories may recall this act finally became law in late 2014, 20 months after it was introduced. The president signed it shortly after the death of Eric Garner of New York City. Garner's death was shortly after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
The measure was supposed to finally create a database tracking deaths in which police were involved. We could finally look at actual data and stop tarring all law enforcement agencies with the same brush whenever one officer anywhere committed a shooting in which racial prejudice appeared to be a factor, I argued at the time. We could find out where the problems are, I said. We could identify the departments where their culture allowed racial bias to flourish, I said.
A year and a half later, the killer or killers in Dallas tarred their victims with a brush so broad it reached from Louisiana to Minnesota, and there's still no database.
The degree to which we refuse to study gun violence while having to read about it and even watch it every day is astounding. First there's not realizing there's a problem. Then there's ignoring a problem. Then there's denying a problem. Then there's willful blindness. Finally, there's sustaining a taboo so mindless that it defies all rational explanation.
On a related issue, the Dallas police have come under some criticism -- not much, but some -- for using a remote-controlled vehicle with a bomb attached to kill the holed-up sniper after hours of failed efforts to bring him in. The shooter was shouting that he'd planted bombs and wanted to kill more people. So Dallas police sent him a robot with explosives attached to a metal rod. Apparently, this offends the sensibilities of some. I don't see a practical difference between that and, for instance, an infantryman throwing a grenade into an enemy pillbox.
Former policeman Seth Stoughton, an assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina, nailed this one in the Atlantic magazine:
"The circumstances that justify lethal force justify lethal force in essentially every form. If someone is shooting at the police, the police are, generally speaking, going to be authorized to eliminate that threat by shooting them, or by stabbing them with a knife, or by running them over with a vehicle. Once lethal force is justified and appropriate, the method of delivery -- I doubt it's legally relevant."
Commentary on 07/09/2016