Tag Archives: Police

Police captain shot and killed in Kansas City, Kansas

(Reuters) – A Kansas City, Kansas, police captain was shot and killed on Tuesday as he tried to reach a suspect, authorities said.

Police Captain Robert Melton had responded to a report of several people in a vehicle shooting at a man, police said in a statement.

Three or four people in the car ran when police arrived. Melton “attempted to make contact” with a suspect and was shot, the statement said.

Melton was taken to a hospital and died of his injuries, it said. Two people were in custody and one suspect was still at large.

National attention has been focused on attacks on law enforcement officers following the ambush killings of eight police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Verdict due in trial of Baltimore policeman over Freddie Gray death

A man participates in a protest in Union Square after Baltimore Police Officer Caesar Goodson Jr. was acquitted of all charges for his involvement in the death of Freddie Gray in the Manhattan borough of New York

Reuters) – A Maryland judge is scheduled to hand down a verdict on Monday in the manslaughter trial of the highest-ranking Baltimore police officer charged in the death of black detainee Freddie Gray.

Lieutenant Brian Rice, 42, is the fourth of six officers to be tried for Gray’s death in April 2015 from a broken neck suffered in a police van. Prosecutors have yet to secure a conviction in the high-profile case.

Gray’s death triggered protests and rioting in the mainly black city and stoked a national debate about how police treat minorities. That debate flared anew this month with the deaths of African-American men at the hands of police in Minnesota and Louisiana.

Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Barry Williams has said he will announce his verdict at 10 a.m. EDT. He is hearing the case in a bench trial after Rice waived his right to a jury trial.

Rice, who is white, ordered two bicycle officers to chase Gray, 25, when he fled unprovoked in a high-crime area. The officer helped put Gray, who was shackled and handcuffed, into the police wagon face down on its floor.

Prosecutors said Rice was negligent in shackling Gray’s legs and not securing him in a seat belt, as required by department protocol.

But defense lawyers have said Rice was allowed leeway on whether to get inside a van to secure a prisoner. The officer made a correct decision in a few seconds while Gray was being combative and a hostile crowd was looking on, they said.

Rice is charged with involuntary manslaughter, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment. He could face at least 15 years in prison if convicted on all charges.

Williams has acquitted Officers Edward Nero and Caesar Goodson Jr., the van’s driver. A third officer, William Porter, faces a retrial after a jury deadlocked.

(Writing by Ian Simpson in Washington; Editing by Alistair Bell and Lisa Von Ahn)

Multiple Police officers shot, 3 dead in Baton Rouge this morning

Police officers block off a road after a shooting of police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,

By Joseph Penney

BATON ROUGE, La. (Reuters) – Three police officers were shot to death and several others wounded in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday, the city’s mayor said, as the country remained on edge in the wake of police shootings of black men and the killings of five Dallas officers.

The officers in Baton Rouge were responding to a call of shots fired when they were ambushed by at least one gunman, Mayor Kip Holden told NBC News. A gunman was shot but his condition was not clear, a Louisiana State Police official told NBC.

A spokesman for the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office said police and sheriff’s deputies were involved in the shooting incident. “Multiple officers from both agencies sustained injuries and were transported to local hospitals,” he said in an email. He said there were no firm numbers on the number hurt or the extent of injuries.

While the scene of the shootings was contained, police warned residents to stay away from the area, near Airline Highway, which is a mile from the Baton Rouge Police Department headquarters, where dozens of protesters were arrested earlier this month..

Two nearby hospitals were on lockdown, CBS reported. Efforts to confirm the report were not immediately successful.

The reports come a week after a wave of protests against police violence in Baton Rouge and other cities after a 37-year-old African-American father of five was shot and killed at close quarters by law enforcement officers. At one of the demonstrations in Dallas, a gunman opened fire on white officers assigned to the protest, killing five of them.

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert, Ian Simpson, Tim Gardne and Julia Edwards in Washington; Writing by Paul Simao; Editing by David Evans and Mary Milliken)

In U.S. cities hit by killings, shared concerns over cops tactics, race

Law officers march down a street during protests in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,

By Tom Polansek

(Reuters) – Nekima Levy-Pounds, president of the Minneapolis chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, compares the city’s mostly white police department to “an occupying force” when its officers go into black neighborhoods.

In Baton Rouge, minorities are “very wary of police and often afraid of them,” says Michele Fournet, a veteran criminal defense lawyer there.

Long before they were rocked this month by local police killings of black men, the two U.S. cities were grappling with similar problems – police forces viewed by many as overly aggressive and unrepresentative of black communities.

Activists and residents in both places have urged law enforcement to spend more time in neighborhoods building relationships and trust as part of “community policing” efforts. Many would also like the cities to hire more black officers.

Such calls having been growing across the country since the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, a black teenager, by a white officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. Since then, a wave of anti-police protests has spread across the country fueled by high-profile police killings of other black men, including Baltimore police detainee Freddie Gray last year.

“Whether it’s Baton Rouge or Ferguson or Baltimore or Minnesota, we need more community policing,” said Cleve Dunn Jr., a black business man and political consultant in Baton Rouge.

(Racial make-up of Baton Rouge, Minneapolis police: http://tmsnrt.rs/29Bf9We)

Police spokesmen from Baton Rouge and Minneapolis, in statements, said their departments had each made significant strides toward diversity in their forces.

The Minneapolis Police Department said it has been “a national leader and has set national ‘best practice’ standards in community engagement and community policing.”

Officials from St. Anthony, Minn., which provides police service to Falcon Heights and employs the officer who shot Castile, did not respond to questions.

Alton Sterling, the Baton Rouge man who was shot by police on July 5, had peddled CDs for years and law enforcement officers would have known he was not a threat if they were more familiar with the area, local residents said.

One officer is notorious for harassing local black residents, to the point where he has been given a street nickname of “Bro Stupid,” said Burnell Williams, who works with at-risk youth and ex-prisoners for the nonprofit group Against All Odds.

Blacks made up about 55 percent of Baton Rouge’s population in 2010, but only 30 percent of the police force in 2013, according to U.S. government data.

Similar disparities affect Minneapolis, near the tiny city of Falcon Heights where Philando Castile was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop on July 6.

STAFFING PROBLEMS

Blacks in Minneapolis were 8.7 times more likely than whites to be arrested for low-level offenses, such as trespassing and disorderly conduct, according to a study of arrests from 2012 to 2014 that the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota published last year.

Blacks accounted for about 19 percent of Minneapolis’ population in 2010 but just about 9 percent of the city’s police officers in 2013, according to U.S. data.

Black residents of Minneapolis and nearby towns said the lack of a requirement for police to live in the jurisdictions they patrol has kept officers disconnected from neighborhoods. Some U.S. cities have instituted residency requirements for police.

“You have mostly white officers patrolling a poor black neighborhood where they have no real nexus to the community, where there are high rates of complaints against the use of excessive force by police and the over-criminalization of the African American community,” Levy-Pounds said.

Some Minneapolis police and residents said staffing shortages limited officers’ ability to do more community policing.

Bob Kroll, president of the city’s police union, said the department needs to increase its numbers by about 20 percent. Without more officers, “you’re just going call to call to call, 9-1-1,” he said.

Ronald Edwards, a black civil rights activist in Minneapolis who contacted Reuters at the request of the police department, said he believed the city’s police chief was doing her best to improve race relations.

However, he said “you don’t have enough officers to deploy them and do the things that really begin to break down the barriers between people of different colors.”

In Dallas, where five police officers were murdered in the wake of the shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana, police Chief David Brown told reporters on July 11 that community policing was the best way to deter crime and protect officers.

Brown, a 33-year department veteran, noted that 2015 was the 12th year of crime reduction in Dallas, more than any other major American city.

Police “have done this by also protecting the civil rights of our citizens,” Brown said of the decline.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley, Ernest Scheyder, Letitia Stein, Nick Carey and Tom Polansek; editing by Stuart Grudgings)

Cleveland activists wary of city plans to process thousands of arrests

Students Iris Harris and Domonique Dumas with their mentor Kevin Sarran display their Griffin scout robot that will be used by police during a demonstration of police capabilities near the site of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland,

By Kim Palmer

CLEVELAND (Reuters) – Police in Cleveland say they aim to avoid mass arrests at the protests planned for next week’s Republican National Convention, but preparations by the city’s courts to process up to 1,000 people a day have some civil rights activists worried.

Thousands of people from across the country are expected in the city to protest the expected presidential nomination of New York businessman Donald Trump, who has vowed to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and restrict immigration from countries with large Muslim populations if elected.

Supporters and opponents of Trump have clashed at several of his campaign events.

Police have vowed to honor protesters’ rights of free expression, which are protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and avoid mass arrests.

“We don’t want anybody to trample on anybody else’s rights,” Cleveland police chief Calvin Williams told a news conference on Tuesday.

But memories of recent heavier-handed approaches are fresh in the heavily Democratic, majority black Ohio city of 388,000 people.

“I don’t want to be a naysayer here and rule out the possibility that everything is going to be hunky-dory … but knowing how the Cleveland Police Department has handled situations in the past, I just don’t have confidence that it’s going to work,” said Terry Gilbert, an attorney who has handled criminal and civil rights cases in the city for more than four decades.

“Until I see the actual situation next week, I’m going to be worried,” Gilbert said.

Gilbert pointed to the May 2015 arrests of 71 people following the acquittal of a police officer who fired 137 shots following a high-speed 2012 car chase, killing a black man and woman.

The arrested protesters were held for more than 36 hours over the Memorial Day weekend, and four alleged in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union that police intentionally kept them in custody longer to prevent the protest from reforming.

‘WE ARE READY’

Cleveland paid $250,000 to secure 200 extra rooms in the Cuyahoga County jail, according to the Republican National Committee budget.

Cleveland Municipal Court officials said they would be ready to process a large volume of people quickly, with staff scheduled to work in two 10-hour shifts keeping the court operating from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m. each day.

“We are ready,” said Ed Ferenc, a spokesman for the court. “We’ll have staff here till 1 a.m. If we have to do a docket at 10:30 at night, we’ll do it.”

The United States has seen hundreds of protests over the past two years following a series of high-profile police killings of black men. The vast majority of the protests have been peaceful, although they have been punctuated with bursts of rioting, arson and looting.

The ACLU plans to be out in force to ensure that people are not arrested for legal protests, said Christine Link, the group’s executive director in Ohio.

“Let’s not equate a lot of protesters with violence,” Link said. She noted the group would be keeping careful watch on the whereabouts of anyone arrested to ensure they are charged and released quickly.

At the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, hundreds of protesters were swept up and pushed into pens on the Hudson River.

With temperatures expected to reach 90 degrees F (32 C) most days, the health of detainees will be a concern, she said.

“What we’re worried about is that they’re not saying where they are booking people, they are being vague about it and that’s not good,” Link said. “That’s an attempt to hide the cheese.”

(Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Peter Cooney)

First funerals held for Dallas police slain in racially motivated ambush

Police officers pay their respects ahead of the funeral for Officer Lorne Ahrens in Plano

By Jon Herskovitz and Lisa Maria Garza

DALLAS (Reuters) – Thousands of police officers joined by ordinary citizens attended funerals on Wednesday for three of the policemen shot dead in a racially motivated ambush attack last week that intensified America’s long-running debate on race and justice.

At the Dallas megachurch called The Potter’s House, officers by the thousands crowded into the funeral for Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer Brent Thompson, who had married a fellow officer just two weeks before last Thursday’s attack.

“I know many of you have dealt with these things quite often,” pastor Rick Lamb of Northside Baptist Church told the crowd. “Today is about Brent and trying to bring some closure to this family as they finish the job that they didn’t want to start, but had to start last week.”

Funerals were also taking place on Wednesday for Sergeant Michael Smith, 55, and Officer Lorne Ahrens, 48, of the Dallas Police Department.

The funerals came a day after President Barack Obama praised the slain officers’ heroism, condemned the attack as an “act not just of demented violence but of racial hatred” and made an impassioned plea for national unity.

The five officers were killed by a former U.S. Army Reserve soldier who told police that he was angry about police killings of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota earlier that week and wanted to “kill white people,” especially police.

Funerals for the other two slain officers, Michael Krol, 40, and Patrick Zamarripa, 32, are expected later in the week.

The shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota were the latest in a series of high-profile police killings of black men in various U.S. cities that have brought intense scrutiny of police use of force, particularly against black suspects.

The police slain in Dallas last week were patrolling a demonstration decrying the killings by police of Alton Sterling, 37, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile, 32, outside St. Paul, Minnesota. Sterling was killed after officers responded to a call that he had threatened someone with a gun. Castile was killed during a traffic stop.

In Baton Rouge, Sterling’s 15-year-old son, Cameron Sterling, urged people to refrain from violence as they demand reforms in the U.S. criminal justice system.

“I feel that people in general, no matter what the race is, should come together as one united family,” Cameron Sterling told reporters in the parking lot of the Triple S Food Mart, where his father was killed. “I want everyone to protest the right way. Protest in peace. … No violence, whatsoever.”

Justin Bamberg, a lawyer for Sterling’s son, said he hoped the officer who shot Sterling would be criminally charged following the federal investigation into the incident.

“We want justice. We want an indictment,” Bamberg said.

A lawyer for the officer has denied race was a factor in Sterling’s shooting.

Protests against police violence continued on Wednesday. In Minneapolis, a mixed-race group of several dozen protesters briefly closed the southbound lanes of a major highway, linking arms and chanting “Black Lives Matter.”

(Additional reporting by Letitia Stein in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Colleen Jenkins in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Justin Madden in Chicago; Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Will Dunham)

San Francisco police search blacks, Hispanics more than whites: panel

Police standing on Lombard Street

By Curtis Skinner

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Three former judges examining accusations of racial bias by police in San Francisco said in a report released on Monday that black and Hispanic people were more likely to be searched without their consent by officers than whites and Asians.

The panel released its report as the United States reeled over the slayings of five police officers in Dallas who were on duty at a protest over the slayings of black men in Baton Rouge and Minneapolis.

“The panel found indications of institutionalized bias and institutional weaknesses in the department,” Anand Subramanian, executive director of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Transparency, Accountability, and Fairness in Law Enforcement, said at a news conference.

The panel, consisting of retired state Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, retired Superior Court Judge LaDoris Cordell and retired federal Judge Dickran M. Tevrizian, was convened by San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón in March 2015 after racist text messages sent and received by San Francisco officers were made public.

San Francisco Police said in a statement after the report was released that they appreciated the panel’s efforts and would review the findings before turning over their analysis to Justice Department.

The panel said in a 240-page report that blacks and Hispanics were more likely to be searched after traffic stops than whites or Asians yet less likely to be carrying contraband.

According to the report, of all non-consensual searches after traffic stops, 42 percent in 2015 involved black motorists. The U.S. Census showed that in 2015, blacks made up less than 6 percent of the city’s population of 865,000.

Hispanics, who made up about 15 percent of San Franciscans in 2015, accounted for 19 percent of non-consensual searches, while whites accounted for half the population, but 21 percent of non-consensual searches, the report said.

Asians made up more than a third of the population, but were searched without their consent fewer than 10 percent of the time, according to the report.

The report recommended that San Francisco’s police department should improve its training on implicit bias, procedural justice and racial profiling, and called for stronger oversight.

The San Francisco Police Officer’s Association called the report misleading and divisive.

“We’re sitting on a tinderbox and Gascón is lighting a match,” association president Martin Halloran said in a statement.

San Francisco’s police department has been roiled by protests since December after the videotaped fatal police shooting of a black man.

The death of Mario Woods, 26, prompted a U.S. Department of Justice review of the police department.

(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Sharon Bernstein)

Five people suspected of shooting at police arrested in Washington DC

(Reuters) – Five people suspected of shooting at police officers before barricading themselves inside a vehicle in Washington D.C. were arrested on Tuesday, police said.

No one was reported injured in the incident, which took place days after five police officers were fatally shot during a demonstration in Dallas to protest at police violence against black men and other minorities.

In the incident in Washington D.C., officers in marked patrol cars were responding to reports of gunshots just after midnight in the southeast of the city when at least one person inside a parked SUV opened fire on the patrol cars, a spokeswoman with the Metropolitan Police Department said.

The officers returned fire, the spokeswoman said, and the five suspects – three women and two men – hid inside the vehicle during a 30-minute standoff before surrendering.

It was not immediately clear why the suspects fired at police or what criminal charges they might face.

(Reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Frances Kerry)

Dallas police chief says armed civilians in Texas ‘increasingly challenging’

Baton Rouge Protest

By Ernest Scheyder

DALLAS (Reuters) – The Dallas police chief stepped into America’s fierce gun rights debate on Monday when he said Texas state laws allowing civilians to carry firearms openly, as some did during a protest where five officers were killed, presented a growing law enforcement challenge.

Dallas Police Chief David Brown also gave new details about his department’s use of a bomb-carrying robot to kill Micah Johnson, the 25-year-old former U.S. Army reservist who carried out last Thursday’s sniper attack that also wounded nine officers.

A shooting in Michigan on Monday underscored the prevalence of gun violence in America and the danger faced by law enforcement, even as activists protest against the fatal police shootings of two black men last week in Louisiana and Minnesota.

Two sheriff’s bailiffs were shot to death at a courthouse in St. Joseph in southwestern Michigan, and the shooter was also killed, Berrien County Sheriff Paul Bailey told reporters.

By Monday evening, protesters were marching again in several large American cities, including Chicago, Sacramento, and Atlanta, where news footage showed a number of protesters being arrested after street demonstrations north of downtown.

President Barack Obama and others reiterated their calls for stricter guns laws after last month’s massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, but many conservatives responded that such measures could infringe on the U.S. Constitution’s protection of the right to bear arms.

Texas is known for its gun culture and state laws allow gun owners to carry their weapons in public. Some gun rights activists bring firearms to rallies as a political statement, as some did at Thursday’s march in Dallas.

“It is increasingly challenging when people have AR-15s (a type of rifle) slung over, and shootings occur in a crowd. And they begin running, and we don’t know if they are a shooter or not,” Brown said. “We don’t know who the ‘good guy’ versus who the ‘bad guy’ is, if everybody starts shooting.”

Seeing multiple people carrying rifles led police initially to believe they were under attack by multiple shooters.

Brown did not explicitly call for gun control laws, but said: “I was asked, well, what’s your opinion about guns? Well, ask the policymakers to do something and I’ll give you an opinion.”

“Do your job. We’re doing ours. We’re putting our lives on the line. Other aspects of government need to step up and help us,” he said.

‘SIMPLY MISTAKEN’

Rick Briscoe, legislative director of gun rights group Open Carry Texas, said Brown was “simply mistaken” in viewing armed civilians as a problem.

“It is really simple to tell a good guy from a bad guy,” Briscoe said. “If the police officer comes on the situation and he says: ‘Police, put the gun down,’ the good guy does. The bad guy probably continues doing what he was doing, or turns on the police officer.”

Police used a Northrop Grumman Corp <NOC.N> Mark5A-1 robot, typically deployed to inspect potential bombs, to kill Johnson after concluding during an hours-long standoff there was no safe way of taking him into custody, Brown said.

“They improvised this whole idea in about 15, 20 minutes,” Brown said.

“I asked the question of how much (explosives) we were using, and I said … ‘Don’t bring the building down.’ But that was the extent of my guidance.”

The incident is believed to have been the first time U.S. police had killed a suspect that way, and some civil liberties activists said it created a troubling precedent. Brown said that, in the context of Thursday’s events, “this wasn’t an ethical dilemma for me.”

The attack came at the end of a demonstration decrying police shootings of two black men in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and near St. Paul, Minnesota. Those were the latest in a series of high-profile killings of black men by police in various U.S. cities that have triggered protests.

In the shooting near St. Paul, the Star Tribune newspaper reported that the officers had pulled over 32-year-old Philando Castile because one of the patrolmen thought he and his girlfriend matched the description of suspects involved in a robbery.

In Dallas, a vigil was held for the slain officers on Monday evening.

In Chicago, images and footage on social media and news stations showed about 500 protesters marching through downtown after holding a quiet sit-in in Millennium Park that spilled into the streets and a rally near City Hall.

In Atlanta, media footage showed a number of handcuffed protesters being loaded onto a police bus surrounded by armed officers and emergency vehicles with lights flashing. Television station WSB-TV reported that police started arresting demonstrators marching on Peachtree Road at about 8:30 p.m.

In Sacramento, about 300 people were marching peacefully on Monday evening. Earlier in the day, in an incident not linked to protests, Sacramento police said officers fatally shot a man carrying a knife after he charged at police.

Johnson was in the U.S. Army Reserve from 2009 to 2015 and served for a time in Afghanistan. He had been disappointed in his experience in the military, his mother told TheBlaze.com in an interview shown online on Monday.

“The military was not what Micah thought it would be,” Delphine Johnson said. “He was very disappointed. Very disappointed.”

The Dallas police chief, who is black, urged people upset about police conduct to consider joining his force.

“Get off that protest line and put an application in, and we’ll put you in your neighborhood, and we will help you resolve some of the problems you’re protesting about,” Brown said.

(Additonal reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas, Fiona Ortiz and Justin Madden in Chicago, Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles, and David Beasley in Atlanta; Writing by Daniel Wallis, Scott Malone and Eric M. Johnson; Editing by Will Dunham, Peter Cooney and Paul Tait)

Dallas Protesters embrace the force that took bullets for them

A Dallas police officer wears a custom mourning band and a flower at a makeshift memorial at police headquarters following the multiple police shootings in Dallas, Texas, U.S

By Ernest Scheyder and Brian Thevenot

DALLAS (Reuters) – Dallas police detective Frederick Frazier strained to lift the dead weight of a fallen fellow officer from a hospital gurney and put him into a body bag. He pulled the zipper closed.

Frazier stared down, thinking – this man does exactly what I do; has a family just like mine. He’s not going home.

Frederick was among about 100 officers who had seen all five fatally shot Dallas policemen arrive at the emergency room of Parkland Memorial Hospital near the Oak Lawn section of the city early on Friday morning.

Seven others, and two civilians, were wounded. They had all been shot on Thursday night by one brutally proficient shooter who police and protesters initially believed was a small army carrying out a choreographed assault. The shooter, in later conversations with police during a standoff, suggested he was avenging a spate of police shootings of black men.

In the city’s struggle to cope with the aftershocks of the deadliest day for law enforcement in America since the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks, a Blue Lives Matter movement has emerged here. It has been embraced by protesters who witnessed the slaughter of officers who had walked with them, taken selfies with them as they protested shootings by police nationwide.

The attack on police complicates the already angst-ridden debate over officer-involved shootings. But many citizens, officers and officials of all political stripes here have so far responded by embracing one another, raising hopes for a softening of hardened positions and often vicious rhetoric.

“We are a polarized people,” said the Rev. Dr. Michael W. Waters from the pulpit on Sunday at Joy Tabernacle A.M.E. Church in Cedar Crest neighborhood, south of downtown Dallas. “Individuals believe that, if you are one thing, you can’t be another thing … but standing for justice does not mean standing against all police officers.”

Dallas now finds itself at the center of a tense national debate about whether police are the problem or solution, victimizers or victims. The city would seem to be an unlikely target for retaliation against police shootings, given that its officers have not shot a single suspect – of any race – so far this year, compared with 23 such incidents in the whole of 2012.

The decrease follows an intensive effort to train officers in the appropriate use of force.

Violent crime in Dallas has been slashed by nearly half between 2003 and last year, when there were 9,038 violent crime incidents, according to Dallas Police Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation records.

Still, the department – along with the city of Dallas and much of Texas – struggles to overcome a history of racial strife.

WATCHING THE WOUNDED ARRIVE

In the Parkland Memorial E.R., the wounded officers arrived, one by one. Frazier watched, trying to assess each one’s chances. Two seemed lifeless. They weren’t going to make it. Another, Mike Smith, 55, came in talking.

Frazier was almost sure he would live.

Then, soon after, the surgeon delivered the news: Smith had died in surgery, Frazier said.

Nurses wept, he said. Doctors were devastated.

Dallas Police Chief David Brown was among those at Parkland Memorial, consoling officers and their families, starting at about 2 a.m., Frazier said. Nearly an hour later, Brown walked into a room in the E.R. with more news.

“They just got him,” Frazier recalled the chief saying.

Minutes before, in a parking garage at El Centro Community College, the Dallas SWAT team had ended the standoff with Johnson by sending in a robot and detonating a pound of C4 explosives. The gunman – later identified as Army Reserve combat veteran Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, of Mesquite, Texas – told police he had come to kill white police officers.

He killed four of them – Lorne Ahrens, 48; Michael Krol, 40; Brent Thomson, 43; and Smith. He also gunned down Hispanic officer Patrick Zamarripa, 32, a Navy reservist and a U.S. Marine veteran.

The chief, it seemed, had hoped the news would lift the somber mood in the room, Frazier said.

Spokespeople for the Dallas Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for official department comment on this story.

‘MASS OF HUMANITY’

Minutes before the shootings, Waters, the pastor, had addressed the crowds of protesters downtown. Then he saw what he later called “a mass of humanity” stampeding toward him as he ducked behind a pillar.

Among those in the crowd was Marcus McNeil, 19, a sophomore offensive lineman on the Southern Methodist University football team. As the shooting started, McNeil saw the fear in the faces of the police officers around him.

“Active shooter! Active shooter!”

The message spread from officers through the crowd as the wave of panic rose with the flurry of rifle shots.

McNeil fled with his best friend, Tessa Johnson, 19, a fellow SMU student. He watched as officers first tried to hurry protesters out of harm’s way, then rushed toward the gunfire with guns drawn.

Minutes before, during the protest, McNeil could not have felt safer, surrounded by officers who seemed determined to protect the crowd’s right to publicly air their grievances with law enforcement, and to engage with them warmly.

“They were absolutely amazing. They actually led, and blocked off the streets as we went,” McNeil recalled. “There was a loving spirit; no negativity among anyone; just kindness.”

BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS

Two days later, that spirit returned to Joy Tabernacle A.M.E. Church, where a predominantly black crowd of about 50 congregants made the joyful noise of a thousand. Waters founded the church seven years ago and remains senior pastor.

Sharmeene Hayes, 45, opened the Sunday service with a prayer.

“Send a peace across the city of Dallas that surpasses all understanding,” she implored. “We thank you, Lord, for our police officers. Post your guardian angels over them.”

Off to the right, Dallas police officer Margarita Argumedo, wearing her uniform, swayed gently to the boisterous gospel music filling the small room. She leaned on the chair in front of her, her eyes closed, for minutes at a time, praying and resting. She had not slept much since Thursday.

Neither had fellow police officer Chelsea Whitaker, who sat two rows ahead.

Both women, who had been invited to the service, were celebrated and given the opportunity to speak. Whitaker offered a gripping portrait of everyday threats officers face.

“Part of my job is serving warrants for the U.S. Marshal’s Service,” she said. “If somebody killed somebody, I’m coming through the door. If somebody raped somebody, I’m coming through the door. If somebody robbed somebody … Violent crime is what me and my team do.”

Argumedo asked for prayers, and for rest.

“You can’t sleep,” she said. “When you lay down, you start thinking about those that didn’t come back.”

Waters referenced the teachings of Jesus in the biblical book of Matthew. He at first spoke softly, then in a rising, rhythmic style that is the hallmark of many African-American preachers.

By the time he hammered home the essential challenge of the sermon – and the past week’s bloodshed – his baritone voice shook the room.

“Do you truly think that all lives matter?” he roared. “If you want to be a peacemaker – if you want to be like Jesus – we have to love our enemies and pray for those who despise us.

“If you think that black lives matter, then you know that all lives matter – and that blue lives matter. Can you honor and celebrate those officers who protect us every day? … If you stand with those who are criticized, you will get closer to God.”

(Reporting by Brian Thevenot and Ernest Scheyder, additional reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin and Marice Richter in Dallas; editing by Ross Colvin)