As Police Killings of Minorities Mount, Attacks on Police Like the One in Dallas, While Awful, Are Also Sadly Predictable

By Dave Lindorff

            The tragedy that is America has deepened with the news that several people on Thursday organized a military-style sniper attack targeting police in Dallas during a protest march and rally against police brutality and killings of black people in that city.

            The murder of anybody, whether it’s a police officer or someone who is simply stopped by a cop for a minor traffic violation and is then shot because a jumpy officer mistakes reaching for a wallet to be reaching for a gun, as happened just two days ago in Minnesota, is a dreadful thing.

            But it has to be said that, with American police -- most of them white -- gunning down over 500 people -- most of them black or brown and most of them unarmed -- in just the first half of this year, it was bound to happen that somebody, or some group of people, would decide to retaliate by taking revenge on the police. That’s not to justify what happened in Dallas, and we still need to learn who was involved in this shooting of 12 cops and two civilian protesters, killing five police officers, and what their motives were. It’s just to say that if the police continue to treat one segment of American society as enemy combatants in a war zone, and if the legal system continues to give brutal cops a pass when they maim or kill innocent citizens, including young children, effectively granting them immunity for their atrocities, there will inevitably be a violent reaction.

            Recall the origins of the Black Panther movement, which grew out of a period of urban riots and insurrections across the country to which the nation responded not with jobs, social programs and better school funding, but with military assaults and occupations by armed soldiers. The Panthers openly armed themselves and started shadowing police on patrol in their communities, determined to make it clear that police could not occupy their communities and abuse the residents with impunity. Their bold actions were effective, but they brought down on themselves the full repressive force of the federal government, which launched a full-scale attack to destroy the Panther organization, using informants, agents provocateur, dirty tricks, mass arrests and murder.

            In the post 9-11 era of military policing, the situation in minority communities today is at least as bad as, and probably worse, than it was in the 1960s. Social welfare programs that were created in response to the ‘60s riots, have been gutted, causing poverty and hopelessness to spread and deepen. Prisons have been filled with mostly non-white inmates as sentencing guidelines have become stricter and sentences longer. Violence in urban neighborhoods has exploded, and police today in many cities perceive themselves not as “peace officers” but as soldiers operating in hostile war zones, and act accordingly.

            Can we be surprised then, that there has been a military-style response in one of those cities?  That is not to justify this bloody act in Dallas, just to explain its inevitability...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3226