When Dallas police killed gunman Micah Johnson with a bomb-disposal robot Friday morning, Johnson also became the first person killed by the city’s police in 2016. Of police departments in the 10 most populous cities in the US, the Dallas police department is the only one without a fatal shooting by police so far this year.
The department’s community policing initiatives and unusual transparency have been lauded by reform advocates amid a national conversation on U.S. police killings and race. “This police department trained in de-escalation far before cities across America did it,” the city’s Mayor Mike Rawlings said on Friday. Last year, Dallas police killed six people.
Excessive force complaints against Dallas officers dropped by 64 per cent between 2009 and 2014, The Dallas Morning News reported last year. Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told the paper that the department’s de-escalation training could serve other police forces. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2016
