Caribbean Times 49th Issue - Tuesday 12th July 2016

12 c a r i b b e a n t i m e s . a g
Tuesday 12th July 2016
Dallas police had taken steps
to mend rift with minorities
Dallas Police Chief David Brown answers questions during a news
conference, yesterday, in Dallas.
DALLAS – When Micah
Johnson opened fire on
Dallas police in an act of
vengeance against white
officers, he was attacking a
department whose chief has
been lauded across the country
for taking bold steps to
root out bad cops and repair
relations with minorities.
Police Chief David
Brown, a black man who
pushed through the reforms
despite resistance from the
rank-and-file, boasted at a
news conference Monday
that crime, police shootings
and excessive-force complaints
against the department
have all dropped dramatically
on his watch.
“This is the best department
in the country, and I’m
proud to be associated with
the men and women of the
Dallas Police Department,”
he said.
Johnson, a black Army
veteran who served in Afghanistan,
killed five officers
in a sniper attack Thursday
that he portrayed as payback
for the fatal police shootings
of black men last week
in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
and suburban Minneapolis.
The attack ended with Johnson
blown up by a bomb delivered
by a police robot.
No evidence has come
to light to suggest that the
25-year-old Johnson had a
grudge specifically against
the 3,400-officer Dallas Police
Department.
“Dallas PD is paying the
price for problems elsewhere
around our country,” said
Mohamed Elibiary, a former
Texas-based Department of
Homeland Security adviser.
Carlyle Holder, president
of the National Association
of Blacks in Criminal Justice,
had been holding up the
Dallas Police Department
as an example of a law enforcement
agency effectively
addressing the problem
of racial disparities in police
work.
“That’s what made the
killing of those officers so
much harder to take,” he
said.
Brown became chief in
2010, taking over a department
that a generation ago
had one of the highest rates
of civilian shootings in the
country. In 2012, his efforts
to heal the rift between police
and the black community
took on greater urgency
when the killing of a black
man by a white officer triggered
widespread protests.
The chief responded by
creating a public database
to track shootings by police,
requiring officers to undergo
lethal-force training every
two months instead of every
two years, and firing 70
officers involved in questionable
incidents, including
some who faced charges of
excessive use of force.
The biggest backlash has
come in the last six months,
when Brown started a community
policing program in
mostly Hispanic and black
neighborhoods. He began reassigning
officers from desk
jobs to foot patrols, a move
that was praised by criminal
justice experts but angered
the police unions, who demanded
his resignation.
“We need more boots on
the ground, absolutely,” said
Mike Mata, vice president
of the Dallas Police Association.
“The problem is he was
reassigning detectives from
the office to back on the
streets without any retraining.
It’s almost like you set
them up for failure.”
The dispute further
strained a department that
Brown said is one of the
lowest-paid in the region,
with new recruits making
$43,000 a year, and has had
such trouble recruiting officers
that academy classes
are frequently canceled for
lack of participation.
While attending the University
of Texas at Austin on
a full scholarship, Brown
became motivated to enter
law enforcement when he
returned to Dallas in the early
1980s and found friends
from the neighborhood
caught up in a cocaine epidemic.
Months after he became
chief, his 27-year-old son,
David Brown Jr., was shot to
death by police after killing
two officers.
“I’ve been black a long
time,” Brown told reporters
Monday. “We’re in a much
better place than when I
was young man here, but we
have more work to do, particularly
in my profession.”
(AP)