diamond and the sound of a gunshot negotiation

He wore a ballistic vest and carried high-capacity bullet carriers and an SKS- styled semiautomatic assault rifle, yet next to the protesters with gas masks and AR-15s, he blended right in no officer even took notice of him. Officers in squad cars and on motorcycles moved with them.Īt two minutes to 9 p.m., as the demonstrators inched up Main Street, Micah Johnson, a twenty-five-year-old African-American army veteran, had parked a black SUV on a street near El Centro College and joined the crowd. Texas is an open-carry state.Īs the event was ending, the organizers had made an impromptu move: They'd begun leading the mass of demonstrators in a spontaneous march. The demonstrators had every right to display their guns. Among the crowd, we had spotted about twenty activists wearing heavy SWAT-like vests, gas masks, military fatiguesm, and AR-15 rifles slung over their shoulders. It'd been a bit loud at moments-at one point protestors began chanting 'Enough is enough!'- but that's common at a rally. The Dallas event had gone exactly as planned. My commanders and approximately one hundred officers had been at the scene. Before I darted out the door, my wife, Cedonia, and daughter hugged me tight, and we whispered a quick prayer.Ĭourtesy of the author and the Dallas Police DepartmentĮarlier that evening, at seven p.m., a crowd of about eight hundred had gathered at Belo Garden, a park at the center of town. 'They're low sick,' he explained-a term we use to describe victims who are not likely to make it. 'And what is the condition of the officers?' I pressed. 'How many shooters are there?' I asked, my voice trembling. I was at home after being on the clock for nearly fourteen hours, about to take off my uniform and hit the sack. 'We've got shots fired and three officers down.' 'Hello, uh-chief?' David Pughes, my second-in-command, stammered, sounding out of breath.

On July 7, 2016, those winds of protest swept through Dallas. And of course, Baton Rouge and Minneapolis.

That week thousands assembled in peaceful demonstrations in some of the nation's major cities. The Sterling and Castile shootings were just the latest in a series, and they served as a tipping point. The stop turned deadly when the officer shot him at close range, as Philando's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, live-streamed the encounter on Facebook for the world to witness. The following day, on July 6, Philando, a thirty-two-year-old black man, was pulled over by a Hispanic cop in a Saint Paul suburb. On July 5, the thirty-seven-year-old black male was shot and killed after two white Baton Rouge cops responded to a call that a man wielding a gun was issuing threats outside a convenience store. Alton Sterling of Louisiana and Philando Castile of Minnesota were shot by police one day apart, just after the Fourth of July weekend.Īlton's death came first. Most of those killings did not make national headlines, but over that summer, two claimed the global spotlight. Cops killed 963 people, according to the Washington Post database. More than 130 officers had their lives cut short in the line of duty, and of those, 64 were shot to death-21 in ambushes. In an Esquire exclusive, we've adapted Brown's recount of last year's shooting spree, and how the police, under his guidance, acted to stop it.Ģ016 will go down as one of the bloodiest years in the history of American law enforcement. They, and many other stories of leading a police force in one of America's largest cities, are shared in unsparing detail in his memoir titled Called to Rise, out now.

These incidents, each supremely tragic in its own way, had an enormous impact on Brown's life. was killed in the ensuing shootout with police. This was not the first time Brown had faced tragedy, of course, nor was it the most personal: In 2010, his son, David Jr., suffering from bipolar disorder, killed a neighbor without provocation as well as a police officer who'd arrived on the scene. But in the wake of the shooting, Brown became known nationally not just for swiftly ending the attack but also for the type of humble resilience that inspired others to do the same, effectively helping heal a city in crisis. Leading the Dallas Police Department at the time (and for the previous six years) was Chief David Brown, who'd grown up in the city and whose tenure as the head of the department had been a mixed bag. Though five policemen died, the heroism demonstrated by their fellow officers ensured that the toll wasn't higher. Johnson's intended targets were not the protestors they were the police. On the evening of July 7, 2016, Micah Johnson, an Army Reserve veteran who'd served in Afghanistan, opened fire at a rally in Dallas against the recent police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.

Diamond and the sound of a gunshot negotiation