Dallas police chief David Brown revealed in an interview on Sunday, July 10, that officials believe the gunman who shot and killed five police officers and injured seven others on Thursday, July 7, was plotting more attacks.
“We’re convinced that this suspect had other plans and thought that what he was doing was righteous, and believed that he was going to target law enforcement to make us pay for what he sees as law enforcement’s efforts to punish people of color,” Brown said in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Brown added that investigators found bombmaking materials and a journal at the shooter’s home, suggesting that Thursday’s attack on police, who were working at a peaceful protest against recent officer-involved shootings of black men, was meant to be just the beginning.
“There was quite a bit of rambling in the journal that’s hard to decipher,” Brown added, noting that the shooter, 25-year-old Micah Johnson, “obviously had some delusion.”
During negotiations with Johnson on Thursday, the lone gunman revealed that his motive was to target “white people,” particularly white police officers, in the wake of two back-to-back shooting deaths of black citizens by the police.
A new development in the ongoing investigation is the scene that Johnson left behind when he was eventually killed by a robot-detonated bomb after negotiations for him to surrender fell through.
“At the scene where he was killed, he wrote some lettering in blood on the walls — which leads us to believe he was wounded on the way up the stairwell — on the second floor of the El Centro building. And where we detonated the device to end the standoff, there was more lettering written in his own blood,” Brown said.
Officials are now trying to figure out what Johnson meant by “RB,” two letters that he wrote before his death.
On Saturday, July 9, the Dallas Police Department went on lockdown after they were alerted of a “suspicious person” on their premises. The Dallas Police Department SWAT team was deployed after a reported threat against the police by a group from Houston claiming to be armed.
Despite the recent flurry of incidents, Brown noted that he and other officers will continue to do their duty.
“We’re sworn to protect you and your right to protest, and we’ll give our lives for it,” Brown said in the interview. “And it’s sort of like being in a relationship where you love that person, but that person can’t express or show you love back.… And we just need to hear from the protesters back to us, ‘We appreciate the work you do for us in our right to protest.’ That should be fairly easy.”
