A month after the tragedy in Orlando, a familiar cycle is setting in. Last Wednesday, Americans went to bed thinking about one shooting. On Thursday morning, they woke up to another, watching an innocent victim die on a video taken by his girlfriend. Last Thursday night, Americans fell asleep to the horrors of a third.
Such events used to feel like an aberration. And while the killing of blameless cops reporting for duty at a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas last Thursday night is a new, heinous twist, the outcome — the gunning down of innocents — has become the status quo.
The trouble is, ending America’s scourge of mass shootings and the deep-seated bias in police killings will require many things that the country is not good at. It will require persistence and cooperation, empathy and bipartisanship. It will require policy reform and, specifically, gun control. It will require us to walk a line between numb detachment and murderous rage.
So far, we haven’t found the line. United States President Barack Obama sure tries. Overseas for a Nato summit in Warsaw last Thursday, he had just given extended remarks on the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, when the ambush-style attack in Dallas forced him to take up the topic of gun violence yet again.
He proceeded to say the obvious things that somehow, sadly, still need to be said, that “there is no possible justification for these kinds of attacks or any violence against law enforcement”, and that their deaths are a reminder of the sacrifices they make for our safety.
And then he said the same thing he’s been saying since he took office seven years ago, that easy access to powerful weapons is a big part of the problem. He’s tried just about everything on that front: Soaring speeches, executive actions, congressional entreaties, even leading a black congregation in a soulful rendition of Amazing Grace.
But nothing’s worked. Washington hasn’t budged. If anything, Republicans have dug in their heels. House Democrats’ sit-in for a vote on gun control last month was dismissed by their Republican counterparts as a “publicity stunt” and “not becoming US Congress”. And last week, Republican leadership put its focus on ways to punish Democrats for their actions. Hours before the shooting in Dallas, GOP lawmakers delayed gun control votes indefinitely. It’s maddening and inexcusable and it’s also just one strand of the inter-woven problems in last week’s tragedies. Because, before Thursday night’s attack brought the narrative back around to gun control, the conversation was focused on the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, along with the persistent racial disparity that dogs the US criminal justice system.
At the time of this writing, Sterling and Castile are just two of 566 people who’ve died at police hands so far this year, according to the Guardian’s tracking project The Counted. A disproportionate number of them are minorities. And so Obama in his first speech from overseas called for a reform of America’s justice system in which, these deep-seated biases are “rooted out”. He also said something else that would turn out to be sadly prescient. Namely, that recognising problems within law enforcement shouldn’t be confused with being anti-police.
“If communities are mistrustful of the police, that makes those law enforcement officers who are doing a great job, who are doing the right thing, that makes their lives harder,” he said.
In retrospect, it was an understatement. Conflating a few bad actors with the identity of a group is precisely what suspects involved in Thursday’s shooting did. The gunman who opened fire on officers Thursday said he “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers”, according to Dallas police chief David Brown.
And while many specifics of the shooting remain unclear, like whether more than one suspect opened fire (three are in police custody; the alleged gunman was killed) or how, precisely, this deranged plot was carried out, many things are completely straightforward. Among them is the fact that the police department targeted in last Thursday’s shooting was among the most forward-thinking and transparent in the country, according to Radley Balko, a prominent criminal justice reporter and author of Rise of the Warrior Cop.
What’s clear is that top leadership of the Dallas police department is made up of people of colour and that as far back as 2014, Balko singled the department out in the Washington Post for its enlightened approach to police training, an approach aimed at doing everything possible to cut down on fatal police shootings. What’s clear is that as recently as 2015, there was evidence the department’s progressive policies were bearing fruit. Murder rates in the area were the lowest they’d been since 1965.
What’s clear is that the policemen shot in Dallas should have been the model for departments all around America, not the victims of some blind act of hate. And that when you kill innocents to avenge the death of innocents, it’s not justice or even retaliation, it’s senseless murder.
That’s what Obama was getting at when he warned that black lives matter, but blue lives matter too, and that life everywhere is precious. These actions were carried out by individual actors. Not one of the fallen deserved to die. And the real enemy, the real danger, is anyone who thinks for a moment that one group of people is more deserving of death than any other, and acts on it with a gun.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Lucia Graves is a political writer in Washington D.C.
