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Five Dallas Officers Were Killed as Payback, Police Chief Says
Snipers Kill 5 Dallas Officers at Protest Against Police Shootings
(about 1 hour later)
DALLAS — The heavily armed sniper who gunned down police officers in downtown Dallas, leaving five of them dead, specifically set out to kill as many white officers as he could, officials said Friday. He was a military veteran who had served in Afghanistan, and he kept an arsenal in his home that included bomb-making materials.
DALLAS — Five Dallas police officers were killed and six others were wounded by snipers on Thursday night during a demonstration protesting shootings by officers in Minnesota and Louisiana this week, the Dallas police said.
The gunman turned a demonstration against fatal police shootings this week of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana from a peaceful march focused on violence committed by officers into a scene of chaos and bloodshed aimed against them.
The police believe four suspects coordinated the attack with rifles, Police Chief David O. Brown said, and positioned themselves in triangulated locations near the end of the route the protesters planned to take. The police had three people in custody and were negotiating in the early-morning hours with a fourth, who was in a garage in downtown Dallas at El Centro, a community college.
The shooting was the kind of retaliatory violence that people have feared through two years of protests around the country against deaths in police custody, forcing yet another wrenching shift in debates over race and criminal justice that had already deeply divided the nation.
That suspect had exchanged gunfire with the police and was being uncooperative in talks, Chief Brown said at a news conference in the lobby of City Hall.
Demonstrations continued Friday in cities across the country, with one of the largest taking place on the streets of Atlanta, where thousands of people protesting police abuse brought traffic to a standstill.
The suspect “has told our negotiators that the end is coming and he’s going to hurt and kill more of us, meaning law enforcement, and that there are bombs all over the place in this garage and downtown,” Chief Brown said.
Jeh Johnson, the Homeland Security secretary, said in New York that there was apparently just one sniper, though there were so many gunshots and so many victims that officials at first speculated about multiple shooters.
“We are being very careful in our tactics so that we don’t injure or put any of our officers in harm’s way, including the citizens of Dallas, as we negotiate further,” he added.
Officials said they had found no evidence that the gunman, Micah Johnson, 25, had direct ties to any protest or political group, either peaceful or violent, but his Facebook page showed that he supported the New Black Panther Party, a group that has advocated violence against whites, and Jews in particular.
The three other suspects are a woman who was taken from the garage and two others who were taken in for questioning after a traffic stop.
Searching the killer’s home on Friday, “detectives found bomb-making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition, and a personal journal of combat tactics,” the Dallas Police Department said in a statement.
Chief Brown said the suspects in custody were not providing investigators with many details. “We just are not getting the cooperation we’d like, to know that answer of why, the motivation, who they are,” he said.
Three other people were arrested in connection with the shooting, but the police would not name them or say why they were being held.
The shooting had been carried out by snipers who fired down on a demonstration in the city’s downtown area that until that point had been peaceful, the chief said.
In addition to the five officers who died, seven officers and two civilians were wounded. The Police Department said that 12 officers had returned fire during a wild series of gun battles that stretched for blocks.
They “planned to injure and kill as many law enforcement officers as they could,” Chief Brown said.
After the shooting subsided, Mr. Johnson, wielding an assault rifle and a handgun, held the police off for hours in a parking garage, claiming — apparently falsely — to have planted explosives in the area, and threatening to kill more officers. In the end, the police killed him Friday morning with an explosive delivered by a remote-controlled robot, the Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said.
“Some were shot in the back,” the chief said. “We believe that these suspects were positioning themselves in a way to triangulate on these officers.”
During the standoff, Mr. Johnson, who was black, told police negotiators that “he was upset about Black Lives Matter,” Chief Brown said. “He said he was upset about the recent police shootings. The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
Major Max Geron, of the Dallas Police Department said that the city’s downtown was being swept for explosives, a process that would “take quite a while.”
He refused to rule out the possibility that more people were involved, saying, “We’re not satisfied that we’ve exhausted every lead.”
The police said that four of the dead were Dallas police officers and that one was from the Dallas Area Rapid Transit force. The transit agency identified him as Brent Thompson, 43. He joined in 2009 and was the first DART officer to be killed in the line of duty.
Mr. Johnson, who lived in the Dallas area, served as a private in the Army Reserve from March 2009 to April 2015, according to records released by the Pentagon. He was listed as a carpentry and masonry specialist, and served in Afghanistan from November 2013 to July 2014.
A civilian in the crowd of almost 1,000 people was also wounded.
The sequence of events this week provoked anger and despair, dealing blows both to law enforcement and to peaceful critics of the police, who have fended off claims that the outcry over police shootings foments violence and puts officers’ lives in danger.
The police were also combing downtown Dallas for what they believed was a bomb planted by the snipers as the heart of the country’s ninth-largest city was put on lockdown.
“All I know is that this must stop, this divisiveness between our police and our citizens,” Chief Brown said.
The chief said he had contacted the F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for help in the investigation.
Just hours after President Obama, reacting to video recordings of the shootings in Baton Rouge, La., and Falcon Heights, Minn., spoke in anguished terms about the disparate treatment of the races by the criminal justice system, he felt compelled to speak again, this time about the people who attacked officers.
Chief Brown said that he was not confident that the police had apprehended everyone involved in the shooting, and that a rigorous investigation would continue until “we are confident that all suspects have been captured.”
“We will learn more, undoubtedly, about their twisted motivations, but let’s be clear: There are no possible justifications for these attacks or any violence towards law enforcement,” he told reporters Friday morning in Warsaw, where he was attending a NATO summit meeting, after speaking by phone with Mayor Mike Rawlings of Dallas.
“I can just tell you I’ve never been more proud of being a police officer and being a part of this noble profession,” he said.
The White House said Mr. Obama would travel to Dallas early next week, at the invitation of the city’s mayor. Later in the week, the president will host a discussion between the police and community leaders to help find solutions to racial disparities and ways to better support police, aides said.
In Warsaw, where President Obama arrived early Friday to attend a NATO summit meeting, the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said: “The president has been updated on the shooting of police officers in Dallas. He asked his team to keep him updated on the situation as they get additional information.”
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, who was in Washington, said that the week’s violence had left many people with a justifiable “sense of helplessness, of uncertainty and of fear,” but that “the answer must not be violence.”
Mr. Obama had addressed the police shootings in Baton Rouge and Minneapolis shortly after he arrived in Warsaw. But he made those comments before the reports of the shootings in Dallas.
“To our brothers and sisters who wear the badge, I want you to know that I am deeply grateful for the difficult and dangerous work that you do every day to keep our streets safe and our nation secure,” she said. To the protesters, she said, “Do not be discouraged by those who would use your lawful actions as a cover for their heinous violence.”
The shooting unfolded near one of the busiest parts of the city’s downtown, filled with hotels and restaurants as well as Dallas County government buildings. Videos of the scene circulated widely on social media. In many of them, gunshots could be heard ringing out against a city illuminated by flashing police lights. Teams of armed officers could be seen running through the area.
But William Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, appearing on Fox News, said that there was “a war on cops,” and that the Obama administration was to blame for appeasement of those who attack the police.
Although the shooting occurred during a rally to protest police-involved shootings, it was unclear what relationship the gunmen had to the demonstration.
The attack appeared to be the deadliest for law enforcement officers in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
It was unknown what the motives were, “except they fired on the police,” said Clay Jenkins, the Dallas County judge and the county’s chief executive. “All government buildings in that area are on lockdown. That’s the government center where this is happening.”
“Our profession is hurting,” Chief Brown said, calling the actions of his officers nothing short of heroic. “Dallas officers are hurting. We are heartbroken. There are not words to describe the atrocity that occurred to our city.”
Chief Brown said it was too early in the investigation to say whether there was any connection between the shooters and the demonstration. He suggested that the suspects had some knowledge of the march route.
The shooting erupted just before 9 p.m., only a few blocks from Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. It cut short an emotional but peaceful demonstration, unleashing chaos as terrified marchers, including families with children, ran for cover, while police officers ran toward the shooting, guns drawn and firing back.
“How would you know to post up there?” he said. “So we’re leaving every motive on the table of how this happened and why this happened.” He added, “We have yet to determine whether or not there was some complicity with the planning of this, but we will be pursuing that.”
“I grabbed my shirt because I was close enough, I thought I might have been shot,” said Jeff Hood, a minister who took part in the march. “I was screaming, ‘Run, run!’”
A witness told CNN that she was standing on Main Street shortly before 9 p.m. when “all of a sudden we started hearing, ‘Pop pop pop pop pop.’”
Bystanders captured extraordinary video of the shootout on downtown streets, with officers taking shelter behind patrol cars and pillars, and tending to their fallen comrades, amid the boom of gunfire and the flash and glare of squad cars’ emergency lights.
“I don’t think I’ve ever run so fast in my life,” she said.
The violence struck near one of the city’s busiest districts, filled with hotels and restaurants as well as county government buildings, and hundreds of people spent much of the night trapped in buildings that were placed on lockdown.
The Dallas Police Association confirmed that officers were injured, posting on Twitter: “Pray for Dallas tonight. Officers down.”
The dead included four officers of the Dallas city police, and one from Dallas Area Rapid Transit.
More than an hour after the shootings — but before the suspects were in custody — the mood in Dallas remained tense.
Jane E. Bishkin, a Dallas lawyer who represents five of the wounded officers, said that they were expected to recover, but that one of them, a woman, had suffered a serious injury to her left arm and might be disabled as a result.
In one section of downtown, officers asked an African-American man wearing a bulletproof vest to walk toward them. The man slowly approached with his hands up, and a crowd of onlookers became angry and shouted and cursed at the police. An officer had his gun pointed at a black woman, and many in the crowd quickly began filming the scene with their cellphones. The tension eased as people in the crowd chanted, “Black lives matter.”
After Mr. Johnson was cornered on the second floor of a parking garage, negotiators spent hours trying to get him to surrender, Chief Brown said, but he “told our negotiators that the end is coming and he’s going to hurt and kill more of us, meaning law enforcement, and that there are bombs all over the place in this garage and downtown.”
The shootings occurred after President Obama, reacting with the same horror as many Americans to a video of a dying man in Minnesota who was shot by the police, begged the nation to confront the racial disparities in law enforcement while acknowledging the dangers that officers faced.
“The negotiations broke down, and we had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect,” the chief said. “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.”
Mayor Mike Rawlings cautioned residents that the downtown area was still a crime scene and told people who worked in the area to check DallasCityNews.net to see which buildings were open.
The three other suspects were a woman who was taken from the garage and two others who were taken in for questioning after a traffic stop, but they were not providing much information, the chief said.
“It is a heartbreaking morning to lose these four officers that proudly served our citizens,” he said. “To say that our police officers put their life on the line every day is no hyperbole, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a reality.’’
On Friday, a large part of downtown remained off limits to civilians as detectives, and agents from the F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, combed through the sprawling crime scene.
The protest was planned by Dominique R. Alexander, an ordained minister and the head of the Next Generation Action Network.
Chief Brown suggested that the gunman had some knowledge of the march route.
He said that the organization “does not condone violence against any human being, and we condemn anyone who wants to commit violence.”
“How would you know to post up there?” he said. “We have yet to determine whether or not there was some complicity with the planning of this, but we will be pursuing that.”
“I was right there when the shooting happened,” Mr. Alexander said. “They could have shot me.”
But Dominique R. Alexander, a minister and head of the Next Generation Action Network, who said he had planned the march, said his group did not condone any violence.
“I was right there when the shooting happened,” he said. “They could have shot me.”
