Obama’s comments came as Dallas continued to reel from the rampage while protests over how police use deadly force flared in cities across the country, ranging from peaceful marches in Washington to scuffles with police in Baton Rouge, La. In Dallas, investigators pored over the crime scene and peered deeper into the gunman’s background, including a journal describing “combat-style” tactics such as firing and moving to a new position — a method used in Thursday’s ambush that left five police officer dead.
In a sign of the tensions, SWAT teams and other teams mobilized around the city’s police headquarters after an unspecified threat. No suspect or dangerous item was located, police said, but the sweeping response showed the level of heightened alert. “As painful as this week has been, I firmly believe that America is not as divided as some have suggested,” Obama said while in Poland for a NATO summit. “Americans of all races and all backgrounds are rightly outraged by the inexcusable attacks on police, whether it’s in Dallas or any place else.”
Police say the attacker in Thursday’s rampage — identified as Micah Xavier Johnson, a black 25-year-old from a nearby suburb — told them he was angry over police killings of black men, an issue that surged back into the news this week after these recent incidents in Baton Rouge and outside St. Paul, Minn. Before authorities used a bomb to kill Johnson, they say he told police he wanted to kill white officers. Brown said the attacker’s comments were made during a prolonged, and at times violent, standoff that followed the brutal shooting rampage Thursday night during a peaceful protest over police shootings.
A journal “filled with combat-type tactics” was recovered from the suspect’s home, said Judge Clay Jenkins, Dallas County’s chief executive. The “somewhat voluminous” journal includes “shoot and move” strategies, Jenkins said. “It’s a concept of wanting to move from vantage point to vantage point, without being pinned down in one location, to inflict as much damage as possible,” Jenkins said. The journal was one piece of a puzzle that has led investigators to believe that the suspect acted alone. Initially, because gunfire appeared to have come from multiple locations, shooting people at different angles, authorities believed more than one suspect could have been involved.
The attack fused two topics that have roiled the country in recent years — mass shootings and outrage over how police use force — bringing them together in a horrific way decried by law enforcement officials around the country and activists protesting police shootings alike. Obama said “Americans of all races and all backgrounds are also rightly saddened and angered” over the deaths this week of black men fatally shot by police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota. He also tied the mass shooting here to some of the rampages that have claimed dozens of lives since last year, invoking the rampages at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C.; a gay club in Orlando; and an office party in San Bernardino, Calif. “We cannot let the actions of a few define all of us,” Obama said. “The demented individual who carried out those attacks in Dallas, he’s no more representative of African Americans than the shooter in Charleston was representative of white Americans, or the shooter in Orlando, or San Bernardino, were representative of Muslim Americans. They don’t speak for us. That’s not who we are.”
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