Police chief: ‘We’re asking cops to do too much in this country’

By Brady Dennis and Mark Berman

The Washington Post

DALLAS — Sharp fractures over policing and law enforcement continued to roil the nation Monday in the wake of a bloody, horrific week, as new details emerged in Dallas about the attacker who killed five police officers as well as those who survived the onslaught.

Police here said that they were still sifting through massive amounts of evidence related to the shooting rampage, an effort that entails watching hundreds of hours of videos and conducting scores of interviews. Even while they worked to piece together the gunman’s other plans, the Dallas police chief said he felt police officers were overworked in his city and across the nation.

“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country,” David Brown, the police chief in Dallas, said at a briefing Monday. “We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem, let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops. That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”

While he vowed to continue pushing for reforms, protests over policing continued late Sunday in cities including Memphis, Atlanta and Baton Rouge, La. The capital city in Louisiana has been the scene of intense showdowns between protesters and heavily-armed riot police during demonstrations over the death of Alton Sterling, a black man fatally shot by a white police officer last week.

Some cities remained calm — like Memphis, where the interim police director linked arms with demonstrators — but the appearance of masked riot police in Baton Rouge, followed by widespread arrests there, evoked the frenzied unrest in Ferguson, Mo., which became a national flash point two years ago.

Even as Baton Rouge became the nexus of a debate over policing and law enforcement, the mass killing of police officers in Dallas last week loomed large over a heated debate. Calls for unity after the deaths of black men at the hands of police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and outside St. Paul, Minnesota, were mixed with angry partisan finger-pointing.

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani strongly criticized the “Black Lives Matter” movement, calling it “inherently racist” and again claiming that the “the real danger” to black children is “other black kids who are going to kill them.” (He has made similar comments before; statistics show that most killings are carried out by people of the same race as the victim.)

Charles Ramsey, who served as police chief in Philadelphia and Washington, also warned of another potentially dangerous moment in the near future, saying that it’s likely “some incident” will occur at the the coming political conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia because of the “extreme rhetoric” raging nationwide.

“We are sitting on a powder keg,” Ramsey said during an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” Sunday. “I mean, you can call it a powder keg, you could say that we’re handling nitroglycerin. But obviously, when you just look at what’s going on, we’re in a very, very critical point in the history of this country.”

Brown, the Dallas police chief, said Monday that the rampage in his city would not deter him from continuing to push for reforms to law enforcement, much as his police department has become a model for reforms after a dark history.

“This tragedy, this incident, will not discourage us from continuing the pace of urgency in chasing and reforming policing in America,” Brown said.

Brown, who said he was “running on fumes,” also said Monday that he and his family “received death threats almost immediately after the shooting.”

As the investigation continues, Brown said that authorities believe the gunman — Micah Johnson, a 25-year-old Army veteran — had a larger plot to attack law enforcement as well as explosive materials that could have had “devastating effects” across the city.

“We’re convinced that this suspect had other plans and thought that what he was doing was righteous and believed that he was going to make law enforcement and target law enforcement, make us pay for what he sees as law enforcement’s efforts to punish people of color,” Brown told CNN on Sunday.

Brown also said that the gunman appeared delusional and, at one point before he was killed by a bomb delivered by a police robot, scrawled the letters “RB” in blood. Investigators were still trying to determine what the letters meant.

Also on Sunday, El Centro College — the location that was the epicenter of the attack in Dallas, which unfolded during a protest over police shootings — said that two of the seven police officers who were injured and survived the attack were with the college’s police force.

One corporal was shot and injured by a bullet when Johnson shot out glass doors at the college’s entrance, the school said in a statement, but that corporal continued to work “with bullet fragments still lodged in his stomach.” The other officer was injured by glass shards sent flying by the gunman’s bullets, the school said.

The downtown campus will remain closed through the week, the college said. In other parts of downtown, a sense of normality returned to the streets on Monday morning. Construction workers hammered away on a new development. Government buildings reopened. Jurors reported for duty. Men in ties sprinted to catch buses.

But the crime scene that remained in a central chunk of downtown snarled traffic and served as a reminder of a tragedy that still loomed over the city.

Darlene LaToure and her colleagues at a local law firm still couldn’t get into their offices Monday inside the Bank of America tower, which remained closed. Instead, they gathered around tables inside the Purple Onion restaurant a block away to do their best to carry on with business.

“It didn’t really hit until I came downtown today,” said LaToure, who typically parks in the garage where the shooting began.

It was hardly a routine day for Melvin Davis, who operates a street sweeper in downtown Dallas. Traffic was snarled. Roads were closed.

“I’ll be more than grateful for just a normal day,” said Davis, 52. The Friday morning after the shooting, he came to work to find a mostly deserted downtown that had turned into a sprawling crime scene.

“There was an eerie feeling in the air, given what had happened,” he said. “We couldn’t clear the streets because everything on lockdown.”

Instead, they cleaned a police memorial and a park downtown where a vigil would take place for the victims.

“The mood around here is still kind of somber. It’s still sad,” said Jeff DiCicco, who was setting up tables and chairs outside a nail salon and spa near the shooting site. “Everything is starting to come back to normal. But I don’t think it’ll ever be the same.

“It’s a weird feeling,” he added. “I’m leery. Everybody is leery.”

Christian Washington was ready to head back to his summer internship at Dallas City Hall on Monday. He had been part of the march on Thursday night, and held up his hand to show the still-healing injuries he’d gotten while fleeing from the gunfire.

“It’s not going to be the same here,” said Washington, 17. But at least returning to the office offered a way to think about something different. “To me, work is like a safe place.”