Four Dallas police officers and one Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer have been killed in what the Dallas Morning News called a “coordinated attack during [a] demonstration against recent shootings of black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota.” Altogether, 11 officers and one bystander were shot, in what was the deadliest attack for U.S. law enforcement since September 11, 2001. Two snipers are said to have carried out the assault. One suspect is in custody, and one is dead.
The attack comes at a fraught time in police-community relations. The nation was already reeling this week after two separate incidents, one in Louisiana, one in Minnesota, where black suspects were shot dead by police officers.
Ensuring that the racial demographics of police departments match those of the communities they serve has become a political priority of police reform activists in recent years. It’s worth noting that Dallas’s police department does well on that score: 52 percent of officers are white, a quarter are black, and 19 percent are Hispanic. That almost exactly mirrors the demographics of the Big D itself, where about half the population is white (including Hispanic whites) and a quarter is black, with the remaining spread out among other races.
In a statement, President Obama called the shooting a “despicable attack on law enforcement.”
