DALLAS — A black Suburban coasted to a stop in downtown Dallas on Saturday morning, and Mayor Mike Rawlings, in blue jeans and black cowboy boots, stepped out and surveyed the crime scene. Police barricades still blocked Main Street. FBI agents in navy blue T-shirts and khakis combed the street for evidence; one retrieved what appeared to be an ammunition casing. Rawlings gave some media interviews, then sat down on a park bench. He was still talking in his TV voice: “I’m feeling determined.” And: “I’m feeling like we have a chance to really change things here. I’m feeling . . . ” His voice trailed off. He lowered his head. He began to cry. “God,” he said. “I’m sorry. I haven’t cried through all of this. And now I’m sitting here crying on a park bench like an idiot. I’m sorry, I need to compose myself.” Fifty-three years ago, a sniper assassinated President John F. Kennedy here, and in the national imagination, this became the City of Hate. Civic leaders labored for decades to wipe away that stain. The city became known for other things, too: The championship football team, the prime-time soap opera “Dallas” and money, glitz and gleaming skyscrapers that soared from the plains of North Texas. But the horror of Thursday night — five law enforcement officers slain by a gunman at the end of a peaceful Black Lives Matter rally — has once again left the city in shock, searching for explanations. The protest rally on Thursday, by all accounts, had been moderate in tone, almost a family affair, with protesters and officers feeling at ease, even giving one another hugs — until the chaos erupted. Rawlings and other city leaders wondered whether the ambush of police was symptomatic of deeper unrest in the city, which continues to have a wealthy, mostly white north side and a poorer, mostly minority southern side. Or was it the random crime of a madman? The mayor thinks the latter, but he added, “We’re still debating that issue.” The protesters have been standing down. They remain committed to their cause and angry that Dallas police officers have not faced charges after shooting black citizens. But they said they did not have an antagonistic relationship with the officers in the patrol units typically assigned to protest rallies. “The [police] are humans,” Dominique Alexander of the Next Generation Action Network said. “These officers are a crew that we all recognize from our protests. Of course we are hurting for them.” One activist, Sara Mokuria, 33, co-founder of Mothers Against Police Brutality, pushed back Saturday against the narrative that Dallas has a model police department. She said she saw her father gunned down by police when she was 10 years old. “My father was a kind man who had some problems,” Mokuria said. “And the police killed him in front of my own eyes. That’s Dallas.” She said Dallas has long been image-conscious: “We have no ocean. We have no mountains. What do we have? We have businesses and shopping, and we want to be a world-class city. We want to be something other than a place where JFK got shot. But we have 1 in 3 children living in poverty, and in some neighborhoods, that is 3 in 3 children living in poverty.” On Saturday in South Dallas, community leaders gathered at noon to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the unveiling of a statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Organizer Candace Wicks said of the shooting: “I don’t think you can make sense of it. But I think the political climate has fed into the polarizing of the races. Now they are acting out in violence.” |
