At least five Dallas police officers were killed and seven others wounded Thursday evening as a protest over recent police shootings was interrupted by chaos. The Dallas police chief said an attacker told authorities "he was upset about the recent police shootings" and "wanted to kill white people, especially white officers."....
[The five officers] were killed by "snipers" perched atop "elevated positions," officials said.
Videos circulating on social media showed an individual with an assault-style rifle shoot a police officer in the back at point-blank range.
Let's be clear about what's going to happen next. There will be the usual expressions of faux outrage from politicians who, in more auspicious circumstances, make a hobby of police bashing. This will be followed, not by a call to bring the killers and planners to swift and uncompromising justice, but by the familiar, vacant mush about how we all need to "come together" to be "strong as a city" and understand the "root causes of this tragedy" including, of course, the "anger of the marginalized and excluded."
In other words, the police-as-racist-army meme will be re-cast for a while, but not by much and not for long.
After self-proclaimed Muslim terrorists gun down dozens of innocent Americans at a party or a nightclub, or an Army base, the President immediately characterizes the shooters as lone wolfs and admonish us not to blame Muslims for the carnage. When an African American man gets shot by a police officer, under yet to be determined circumstances, the President calls it a "tragedy" and characterizes it as another example of police racism. In the cases of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, the suggestion that these were racist killings was proven wrong, yet the "hands up don't shoot" narrative continued. Does anybody doubt that what happened last night in Dallas was incited by that narrative?