Tag Archives: Dallas Police Department

local news

Indictment gives us more dots to connect

As if this case didn’t have enough mystery attached to it.

A Dallas County grand jury today indicted a former police officer of murder in the shooting death of a man who was gunned down in his own apartment.

Former Dallas Police Department officer Amber Guyger walked into Botham Jean’s apartment earlier this year and allegedly shot him to death. She said at the time she mistakenly entered his residence, thinking it was her own.

OK. My first reaction was . . . huh? The apartments are on separate floors.

It didn’t take DPD long to fire Guyger after the Sept. 6 shooting. There were protests in Dallas over Jean’s death. Incidentally, Guyger is white; Jean, a native of St. Lucia, was a black man. The racial element of this crime hasn’t risen to the forefront of the community debate. It might eventually.

It gets even weirder.

The Texas Rangers, the crack investigative arm of the Department of Public Safety, charged Guyger with manslaughter. The case then went to the grand jury, which decided today to level the more serious charge of murder against the former officer.

Botham Jean has been described as an upstanding young man, active in his church, a fine individual. I don’t know much about Guyger, about what kind of an officer she was.

What strikes me as strange is that the grand jury, after hearing the evidence and the criminal complaint delivered by the district attorney’s office, would elevate the charge. Manslaughter implies a crime that was committed without intent to take someone’s life; a murder charges alleges that someone intended to take another person’s life.

This case is full of unconnected dots. Some more of them might have emerged with this indictment. I have two related questions: Did Amber Guyger know Botham Jean and was there a reason other than it being a simple mistake that she allegedly entered his apartment and then shot him to death?

The trial will tell us.

This story saddens me terribly.

national news, political news

President speaks eloquently at memorial

memorial

President Barack Obama delivered a touching tribute today to slain Dallas police officers.

The president, along with Vice President Joe Biden and former President George W. Bush, was among the dignitaries lined up on the stage paying tribute to the men who were gunned down by the shooter this past Thursday.

He spoke of their dedication to duty, of their families’ bravery and of the officers’ devotion to protecting the very people who were protesting activities of their fellow brothers and sisters in uniform.

But then he veered briefly into a realm where I wish he hadn’t gone.

He talked about the ease of buying a Glock pistol.

Sigh …

I have noted in a couple of earlier blog posts that a memorial service paying tribute to the five brave police officers was not the place to politicize a message. I guess the president didn’t read my blog, let alone take my advice.

Did it diminish his tribute to the men who died in the line of duty?

Not to my ears — although I am absolutely certain more critical observers will say quite the opposite.

I get that Barack Obama has done this kind of speech-making too many times already during his presidency. I believe in the sincerity of his expression of grief over the victims of this kind of violence.

I also am glad he went to Dallas to hug the victims’ families, and to offer support for the beleaguered and grief-stricken city.

The healing of the city’s wounds, though, is just beginning.

Let it continue to restore a great American city’s sense of self.

national news

Use robots as last resort, not first

dallas-police-used-a-robot-bomb-to-kill-one-of-the-shooting-suspects.png

The Dallas Police Department has earned high praise over the years for its progressive approach to law enforcement.

It stresses community policing and outreach; it employs a widely diversified force of officers working in an ethnically and racially diverse city of more than 1.3 million residents; it has a tactical squad that is second to none.

This past Thursday night, the police department deployed a special weapon to eliminate the shooter who had gunned down 12 officers, killing five of them at the end of a peaceful march through downtown Dallas.

It was a bomb-toting robot device that it armed with a Claymore mine and then detonated near the shooter, who died in the blast.

Some have questioned whether the use of the device was wise. Police Chief David Brown stands firmly behind his decision, as do many other law enforcement officials around the country.

Chief Brown made the right call.

The shooter posed an imminent threat to other officers, not to mention to civilians caught in the hail of gunfire. Dallas PD negotiators sought to talk the gunman into surrendering. They sought a peaceful end to the event. He was having none of it.

The device worked perfectly.

Now, having expressed support for the decision to use the robotic bomb, I want to caution its future use by other departments that possess that kind of lethal technology.

I truly hope it becomes a case of last-resort, rather than first-resort deployment.

Police occasionally have to take extraordinary means to quell the kind of violence that erupted in Dallas this past week.

This technology, though, should be used only when circumstances warrant it … such as the events that unfolded Thursday night in downtown Dallas.

national news, political news

Huck is right about POTUS’s response to shooting

huck

Hell hasn’t frozen over, but it’s a bit chillier down there this morning.

Why? Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — a man with whom I rarely agree — offered a fascinating critique of President Obama’s immediate response to the Dallas shootings overnight.

The president, said Huckabee — himself a former Republican candidate for the highest office — politicized the event by introducing the topic of gun control during his statement on the killing of five Dallas law enforcement officers.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/mike-huckabee-dallas-shooting-obama-225280

The president, Huck said, needed to be more Reaganesque in his response. Huckabee recalled how President Reagan sought to bring the nation together after the Challenger shuttle tragedy. That, he said, ought to be the model for presidents to follow in this time of national grief.

As Politico reported: “During his statement earlier Friday morning in which he condemned the attack as ‘vicious, calculated and despicable,’ Obama remarked that ‘we also know that when people are armed with powerful weapons, unfortunately it makes it more deadly and more tragic, and in the days ahead we are going to have to consider those realities as well.”‘

Huckabee, of course, focused more on the latter part of that statement rather than the first part. But he does make a valid point about how presidents ought to react publicly to events such as this.

“He doesn’t need to inject the divisive arguments like gun control at a time of great grief for the nation,” Huckabee said. “And he ought to do for us what Ronald Reagan did after the Challenger disaster. And that’s remind us of what we have in common, not what separates us. And that’s why I’m always so frustrated. Barack Obama has such great potential to be a leader.”

The president has labeled the acts in Dallas correctly. They were “despicable,” “vicious” and “calculated.”

My hope now is that the president goes to Dallas and embraces the police department and the families of those who were struck down and offers words of healing to a nation that is stunned.

That, too, is how Ronald Reagan would react — and it’s also what Barack Obama has done many times during his presidency.

national news

More tragedy, more violence

2 Comments

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There must have been a reason my sleep pattern last night was so fitful.

When I rolled out of bed this morning, I discovered the horrible truth about what was unfolding overnight in Dallas: five law enforcement officers shot to death by snipers.

Millions of Americans are dumbstruck, shocked beyond belief at what transpired.

A demonstration turned into a riot last night after crowds gathered to protest the shooting deaths of two African-American men by police officers in Baton Rouge, La., and in a suburb of St. Paul, Minn. ; and yes, the officers are white.

Our knowledge of those tragedies is pretty compelling, too, and at one level I share the anger of African-Americans in those communities over the alleged conduct of the officers involved. It’s a fair question to ask: Would these men have died had they been white?

But then … to react in this fashion in Dallas?

Authorities have suspects in custody and they apparently have acknowledged that the shooters were targeting white police officers, that the shootings were acts of revenge over what happened in Baton Rouge and near St. Paul.

Hmmm. Do the Dallas shootings qualify, then, as hate crimes?

What in the name of all that is holy justifies this hideous violence?

The demonstrations in Dallas reportedly were peaceful, quiet and the demonstrators were interacting with police officers. I heard reports last night of officers posing for “selfies” with some of those who were protesting the violence elsewhere.

And then this.

It’s hard to come up with words of wisdom so soon after such senselessness.

I won’t try.

Perhaps it’s best at this point to rely on our first option — which is to pray for the victims, their families, for the community that’s in shock and for the nation that has been stricken once again by violence.

media news

Whitfield apologizes for ‘brave’ remark … I guess

Fredricka Whitfield has more or less apologized for a comment she made Saturday about the guy who stormed the Dallas Police Department headquarters.

The CNN anchor had called him “brave” and “courageous,” drawing a stampede of criticism.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/cnn%e2%80%99s-fredricka-whitfield-apologizes-for-calling-dallas-gunman-%e2%80%98courageous-and-brave%e2%80%99/ar-BBl8L1N

Today she said something quite different: “Yesterday during a segment on the Dallas police department attack, I used the words ‘courageous and brave,’ when discussing the gunman. I misspoke and in no way believe the gunman was courageous or brave,” Whitfield said.

Well, I guess there’s an apology in there somewhere.

The man was shot dead by a police department sniper. He’s been identified as James Boulware, who opened fire on the PD from an armored van.

Whitfield said she “misspoke.”

I’ll just ask one more question: What did she intend to say?