Black Shooter Targets White Police Officers in Deadliest Day for Police Since 9/11

The Wired Word for the Week of July 17, 2016

On Thursday evening, July 7, in downtown Dallas, at a peaceful rally protesting two recent police shootings of black men -- one in Louisiana, and one in Minnesota -- a lone sniper opened fire, killing five police officers who were guarding the rally and wounding seven other officers, plus two civilians.

The killings are the deadliest single incident for law enforcement in the United States since 9/11, according to statistics from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

The shooter was black; the slain officers were not. The attacker said that he wanted to kill white people, especially white police officers. Following a standoff later that evening, the shooter was killed by police.

On Sunday, Dallas Police Chief David Brown, speaking on the news show State of the Union, said, "We're convinced that this suspect had other plans and thought that what he was doing was righteous, and [he] believed that he was going to target law enforcement -- make us pay for what he sees as law enforcement's efforts to punish people of color."

While investigations are still not complete regarding the police shootings being protested at the rally, the victims were both black men who are alleged to have been doing nothing wrong. While the details from the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, shooting are less clear, the one in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, which was recorded on video by the victim's girlfriend, who was also in the car, seems to be at best, a tragic mistake on the part of the officer involved (who is Hispanic, not white), and at worst, a criminal act. But we repeat, the investigation is not complete.

Many groups, including Black Lives Matter, have condemned the shooting of the Dallas police officers.

On Saturday following the Dallas tragedy, CNN Commentator Van Jones said, "[Black people and the police] literally are having and describing the same experience. The police say they feel vulnerable -- that's exactly what the kids in Black Lives Matter are saying."

Jones added, "If, to both sides, it seems that the world is misunderstanding them, it's a good time to say let me open my heart ... listen to the pain of the law-enforcement community, listen to their fear, their sense of being labeled and wronged and misunderstood. Listen to those African-American kids. They can't take off their badge, they can't take off their uniform, but they still feel like they've got a target on their back because of their skin color ... there's now enough pain in both communities that we should be able to understand each other."

Not every observer agrees with Jones. TWW team consultant James Gruetzner pointed out that Jones is assuming that similar subjective feelings reflect similar objective realities. That is, while the feelings might seem real to members of each group, reality may differ radically. What's more, we tend to say "the police," as if all police officers are stamped out of one mold, or "African-American kids," as if they are not individuals but clones. The nuances of individuality can get veiled unless overt and intentional care is taken.

The Daily Beast's editor-at-large, Goldie Taylor, also took issue with Jones' comment and said of black people, "They don't have the same experience. They don't have the same power [as the police]."

Nonetheless, it is to be hoped that the commonality of vulnerability and pain may provide a meeting ground for at least some understanding and a way to reduce the amount of blood in the streets -- both blue blood and black.

Dallas Chief of Police David Brown said what we hope is the feeling of all people of goodwill: "Stop this divisiveness." He speaks from experience: As a patrolman, his patrol partner was killed in a gun battle. His brother was murdered by drug dealers. His troubled son killed two people -- one a police officer -- before being killed in a firefight with police.

More on this story can be found at these links:

Dallas Sniper Attack: 5 Officers Killed, Suspect Identified. CNNAren't More White People Than Black People Killed by Police? Yes, but No. Washington Post
Not Us vs. Them. U.S. News & World ReportCNN Commentator: Black People and Police Have More in Common Than They Think. Business InsiderBlacks Divided on Whether Police Treat Minorities Fairly. Gallup
View From a Black Officer. FaceBook

Applying the News Story

An initial reaction some of us had to the news of the Dallas shootings was "Oh no. Not again." That immediate response was based on the assumption that, like has happened elsewhere, someone was slaughtering random strangers. We were perhaps trying to pigeonhole the news into an "Islamic terrorism" or "gun violence" or "random mass slayings" slot.

But then, rather quickly, we learned that the targeted people were, with a couple of exceptions, police officers. Now the shootings didn't seem random. And when we later learned that the slain officers were white and the shooter was black and had declared that he was intentionally targeting white law enforcement officers, we perhaps tucked this news into a "racial violence" category.

The initial reaction of some may have been more on point. Stories of attacks on police officers and the recent swelling of anti-police rhetoric had already led some to fear an attack on police officers such as happened in Dallas.

The point isn't to see whose initial reaction was more correct, but to highlight a problem: To understand what's going on around us, we sometimes try to fit events into some category. This goes by many names -- "framing" or "stereotyping," for example -- and, although common, is often a reduction or over-simplification. As Peter Roff, contributing editor forU.S. News & World Report, put it in a column about the Dallas police killings titled "Not Us vs. Them" (see links list above), we like things that "can be broken down into easily digestible blocks, because if the last few days are any indication, our culture's capacity for handling anything more nuanced is rapidly evaporating."

Yet, to really look at what's going on in our culture -- and even more, to have any hope of changing it -- we need to be able to work with nuance. Not all incidents of conflict involving people of different races are the same, and not all of them are even "racial" in character, though some are, including, apparently, this Dallas shooting. Not all police are cut from the same cloth. In many cases, an incident in question has little to do with race, other than that one party is black and the other is "blue."

In fact, when we look at the shootings of black people by police as individual incidents -- which, by the way, is what juries have to do in judging the actions of those involved -- it becomes much harder to paint them all with the same paintbrush. In some cases, police have overreacted or let their emotions or even their bias direct them, instead of their training. In some cases, the black person involved was doing some very bad thing or threatening others or threatening the police and needed to be stopped, and sometimes force was the only viable option. In some cases, the black person was mistakenly or wrongly stopped to begin with and was doing nothing wrong.

The claims of Black Lives Matter are based in real experience (read, for example, The Washington Post article in the links list above), but not all black people perceive the police as routinely acting unfairly (read, for example, the Gallup poll results in the links list above). Thus, there is no single fix for the deadly outcome of encounters between black subjects and police officers.

To have a safe society, we will always need police and law enforcement, and we should be grateful for them. At the same time, to again quote Peter Roff, "the training [police] receive in handling confrontation is too often a lesson in how to provoke the very confrontation they are trying to avoid." Still, we should note that when the shooting started in Dallas, the police worked to protect the demonstrators and do their job.

While solutions to the problem of deadly encounters between police and black people will have to touch a myriad of issues, including but not limited to poverty, mental illness, firearms in the wrong hands, the high percentage of black-on-black crime, family breakdown, misuse of power and authority, crime, racism, human perversity and more, for this lesson, we can, at least, acknowledge the limitations of reducing major problems to simplistic, binary, either-or, us-vs.-them explanations.

And, it is to be hoped, that acknowledgement can help us to find ways forward based on greater understanding of and empathy for one another.

The Big Questions

1. In what ways was the Dallas shooting different from other mass shootings that have occurred in the last few years? What are some of the different underlying causes of these violent attacks? What different long-term responses are called for because of those differences?

2. What, if anything, enables you to feel the perceived vulnerability of the black community regarding encounters with the police? What, if anything, enables you to feel the perceived vulnerability of police officers regarding these encounters? What are some ways these perceptions correspond to -- or fail to correspond to -- reality?

3. An old piece of wisdom has it that "two wrongs never make a right" (or, to write it as an equation, 2 wrongs ≠ 1 right). How does it apply to the Dallas news? What is the outcome of this sort of "arithmetic"?

4. What, if anything, do you hear God saying to you out of the Dallas news? If you feel God is silent about this issue, what does that silence say to you?

5. Some commentators pointed out that the Dallas police department has been proactive in working for healthy community relationships, and that in many ways is the opposite of the stereotype of the disconnected police department patrolling what they consider "hostile" territory. Does this seem like the Dallas officers died for someone else's sins? Have you ever felt like you were punished or suffered for what someone else had done? Was that ever addressed? Did you suffer in silence?

Confronting the News With Scripture and HopeHere are some Bible verses to guide your discussion:

Proverbs 3:13-14
Happy are those who find wisdom, and those who get understanding, for her income is better than silver, and her revenue better than gold. (For context, read 3:13-18.)

In Old Testament Hebrew thought, there was a view that God had built the world and life itself to run best in certain logical ways. The idea was that if you could figure out what those ways were and then do your best to cooperate with them, your life would be happy and you would have well-being. That understanding of life was called "wisdom," and as the word is used in the Old Testament, wisdom can be a skill, a body of knowledge, or an attribute of God.

Further, in those times, there were people who devoted their lives to discovering what God's wisdom consisted of. In fact, it became a career for some, so that moral guidance for Israel came not only from prophets and priests, but also from people known as "the wise." As these individuals issued their teachings, they were eventually collected into a body of written material called wisdom literature. In the Old Testament, Proverbs, along with Ecclesiastes, Job and certain of the psalms, are examples of this special category of teaching. Much of the wisdom instruction has an outcome-oriented tone rather than a devotional one, and it focuses on how one should act to make one's way successfully in the world while remaining righteous.

The central theological claim of the wisdom writings is that "the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge" (Proverbs 1:7) -- or, as The Message translates it, "Start with God -- the first step in learning is bowing down to God; only fools thumb their noses at such wisdom and learning."

Questions: In what ways does "bowing down to God" affect your ability and willingness to work toward solutions to deeply rooted, complex problems? In what ways does the pursuit of wisdom bring you closer to God? One of Job's complaints was that he had fulfilled the requirements of wisdom, yet he was being punished for something he didn't do. When have you felt that you've done everything right yet it all turned out wrong anyway?

Ephesians 2:14For [Christ] is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. (For context, read 2:11-22.)

This verse is not directly applicable to the Dallas news, for it's talking about hostility within the church between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, rather than a conflict in the larger society. Nonetheless, in the early church, the division was along racial lines, in that Jews -- even Jewish Christians -- viewed themselves as a separate people from all others.

And certainly, the idea of a "dividing wall" can be applied to barriers that sometimes exist between law enforcement and the public.

Questions: What dividing walls do you have to overcome to empathize with people whose experience of life is significantly different from your own? When is it especially important to make that effort? How can you tear down, or how have you torn down, a wall that separates people of goodwill?

Mark 14:36[Jesus] said, "Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want." (For context, read 14:32-42.)

We've included this verse to illustrate the importance of nuance. While in the Gospels, Jesus usually referred to God as "Father," just as he does here, in this verse, he also uses the Aramaic word "Abba," for which "Father" is the closest equivalent in Greek -- but not an exact equivalent. Actually, Abba was the intimate term used by children to address or refer to their male parent. In English, "Daddy" might be a closer equivalent.

Do you hear the nuance there? In referring to the Father with this more intimate term, Jesus is challenging his hearers to change their minds about God. He might have said it as "Think of God as a good dad. God is not withholding gifts from you; God wants you to have all you need for life. God is not punishing you, God desires to bless you and care for you. God is not far removed from us, God is here now, and the kingdom of God is coming. Change your mind about God; it will change your life."

Questions: When have you misunderstood the importance of something because you failed to recognize the subtle but important differences in the situation described from others that were somewhat similar? Have you ever felt afterward that you had let someone else define the terms of the problem or the possible answers to a central question? How would you redefine the focus of those problems now?

1 Corinthians 13:9, 12
For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; … For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (For context, read 13:1-13.)

Here's one place where the apostle Paul touched quite clearly on the human condition. Mirrors in Paul's day were usually polished metal, with much less precise shaping than the ground glass now used, and therefore one did not get a clear or accurate reflection from them. Thus, Paul used the mirror as a metaphor for the difficulty in fully understanding all that is around us. Yet he does not give up, but looks forward to when his partial knowledge will be exchanged for full knowing -- at the time of God's choosing.

Questions: To what degree do you recognize your view of those whose life experience is different from your own is distorted as if looking in an imperfect mirror? Does that excuse the inaccurate conclusions we sometimes reach? Why or why not? How can we improve our accuracy?

1 Corinthians 11:28Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. (For context, read 11:17-34.)

While this verse specifically relates to Holy Communion, it is a reminder of the need for self-examination: How well do we live up to God's demands? In Titus, the intimation is that self-examination should be done "soberly" (Titus 2:12, KJV), rather than be affected by the emotions of the moment. This allows us to see nuances and, one hopes, to apply self-correction as well as to determine good courses of action.

This guidance applies not only to our thoughts on the Dallas attacks, but to all our public and private dealings.

Questions:What are some ways you do this? How do you do it "soberly" rather than otherwise. When has a sober self-examination caused you to revise or change your opinions?

Matthew 5:43-45You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. (For context, read 5:43-48.)

In the "Big Questions" above, we mentioned the common saying that "two wrongs never make a right" and said that it could be written as an equation: 2 wrongs ≠ 1 right. Jesus' words in the verses above might be considered as a more positive way of stating that same truth, which if written as an equation, would be 1 wrong + 1 right = child of God.

Jesus said it as, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven." Obviously, the words "enemies" and "those who persecute" indicate people who have wronged us. Our natural inclination is to get back at them. But according to Jesus' divine arithmetic, their wrong deed against us does not excuse us for treating them just as badly, because two wrongs never equal one right. If, instead, the wrong deed is answered with love, if we treat the person right despite the fact that they have mistreated us, we are behaving like a child of our heavenly Father.

Question: Where do you need to work on applying this rule of divine arithmetic?

For Further Discussion

1. Discuss this, from a TWW team member: "We are acting under the presumption that all of us deplore the attacks on the Dallas police officers. At dinner this week with my daughter and her husband, she related how shocked she was that so many in her age cohort (25 and under) on her Instagram social networking feed were celebrating the attacks. Although we hope not, I suspect that we would find some people on that side of the fence within our congregations, and even among some of the older people. Rhetorical excesses leading to violence are not unknown; there have been at least two assassination plots or attempts against presidential candidates so far this year. On the other hand, the fact that a person deplores something and expresses that opinion does not make the person responsible for crimes committed by those sharing in the opinion." Have you detected any such celebrations among people you know? How have you responded -- or how should you have responded?

2. TWW team member Frank Ramirez has written a musical titled The Persistence of Vision, which is based on the Amish weekly newspaper The Budget. This weekly newspaper grows in circulation while mainstream newspapers are dying. At one point a reality TV producer asks an Amish woman why would anyone read news a week old? The woman replies by asking what news is worth reading if it's not still significant a week later?
            What is the staying power of the Dallas news story? What should be remembered from it? What do you suppose will be significant about it a year from now?

3. Comment on this, from Martin Luther King Jr.: "Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: It seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers."

4. The following message, titled "Feeling Hopeful," from a black woman named Natasha Howell appeared on her Facebook page shortly after the Dallas shootings. The post has since been removed, but continues to be found on the Internet because it's been circulated by others (see, for example, here). We've have no way to independently verify the incident, though we have no reason to doubt it. In any case, invite your class to respond to it.
            "So this morning I went into a convenience store to get a protein bar. As I walked through the door, I noticed that there were two white police officers (one about my age the other several years older) talking to the clerk (an older white women) behind the counter about the shootings that have gone on in the past few days. They all looked at me and fell silent. I went about my business to get what I was looking for, as I turned back up the aisle to go pay, the oldest officer was standing at the top of the aisle watching me. As I got closer he asked me, How I was doing? I replied, 'Okay, and you?' He looked at me with a strange look and asked me, 'How are you really doing?' I looked at him and said 'I'm tired!' His reply was, 'Me too,' Then he said, 'I guess it's not easy being either of us right now is it?' I said, 'No, it's not,' Then he hugged me and I cried. I had never seen that man before in my life. I have no idea why he was moved to talk to me. What I do know is that he and I shared a moment this morning, that was absolutely beautiful. No judgments, No justifications, just two people sharing a moment."

5. Discuss this, from Oliver Wendell Holmes, a justice of the Supreme Court in the early 20th century: "I wouldn't give a fig for the kind of simplicity which exists on this side of complexity, but I would give the whole world for the simplicity that exists on the other side of complexity."

Responding to the News

Consider using some class time or other occasion to do the word-association exercise described by Reggie Williams in the second half of this article. Then discuss together how the insights gained might be helpful as you function in the larger world today.

Prayer

O Lord, we ask your comfort for the loved ones of those officers who lost their lives in Dallas and for the loved ones of the men killed in the encounters with police in Louisiana and Michigan. We ask for your help for those related to all of this who have been wounded in body or in soul. Please be present in our personal and national efforts to subtract the power of racism, crime and dividing walls from our life in the world. In Jesus' name. Amen.