What happened in Dallas at 8:58 Thursday night was unspeakable.
Five officers shot dead and seven wounded on the job. Shot because they were doing their jobs.
And, from all reports, doing their jobs well. They were on site at a protest but hands off, allowing those gathered to exercise their constitutional right to peaceably assemble and voice their grievances.
And the grievances were volatile.
The protesters wanted to be heard about recent police shootings, the most recent in Minnesota, where Philando Castile was killed during a traffic stop outside St. Paul on Wednesday, and in Louisiana where Alton Sterling was killed in Baton Rouge on Tuesday during a disturbance at a convenience store.
In both cases the victims were black; the officers were not.
And those are just the most recent.
According to The Washington Post, which is tracking fatal police shootings by on-duty officers, Sterling was the 505th fatality this year. That makes Castile the 506th in 189 days — approaching three a day so far in 2016.
That’s an incredibly deeply disturbing number, but it doesn’t give anyone — no matter how angry — permission to shoot back.
The suspect in Dallas, who was killed by police, told them “he was upset about the recent police shootings” and “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
Understood. He was right to be upset because the rate of police shootings is beyond belief. We should all be upset.
As Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton said, “Nobody should be shot and killed in Minnesota for a taillight being out of function,” which was the traffic infraction that drew police attention. He wondered aloud whether it would “have happened if those passengers would have been white? I don’t think it would have.”
Maybe so. Maybe not.
But there is a system of justice in place to hold police officers accountable, and while we may not agree with the outcome of every investigation or whether charges are brought in each instance, that is the system we operate under.
It often doesn’t work, which fuels a righteous anger, but it is a framework that produces results.
Police officer Daniel Harmon-Wright is now facing a murder charge after shooting an unarmed motorist in Virginia in February.
Officer Philip Brailsford is facing a murder charge after shooting an unarmed man during an altercation at an Arizona motel in January.
Former officer Jason Stockley was charged with murder in May. In that case, Stockley shot an armed man following a police chase in Missouri in 2011. It took five years for prosecutors to act, but act they did.
Prosecutions, not assassinations, is how we exact justice in this country.
When Minnesota’s governor spoke to Castile’s family Thursday, the dead man’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds — who witnessed the shooting and livestreamed the aftermath on Facebook — screamed at him: “I don’t want you guys to say you’re sorry! . . . I want justice.”
What happened in Dallas Thursday was not justice. It was murder.
If we ignore our justice system we are lost. And, when judgment is passed on innocents — like the dozen officers in Dallas and two civilian bystanders — we are doomed.
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