Live-streamed tragedy
REUTERS DALLAS Three nights, three shootings, seven deaths.
After multiple snipers opened fire on law enforcement in Dallas on Friday, killing five uniformed officers and injuring six others, after three days of outrage over police-involved shootings and not even a month since the tragic Orlando massacre, a sorrowful nation was left asking: what next?
‘‘Vicious, calculated’’ and a ‘‘despicable attack’’ is how President Barack Obama described the ambush.
‘‘I believe I speak for every single American,’’ Obama said from an early morning press conference in Poland, ‘‘when I say we are horrified over these events.’’
It was the second time Obama had sombrely addressed the nation in less than 24 hours.
On Tuesday, cellphone cameras captured video of a white Baton Rouge police officer fatally shooting a black man named Alton Sterling outside a convenience store where he was selling CDs.
Less than 48 hours later, a Minnesota police officer shot a school cook multiple times during a traffic stop after the man, also black and named Philando Castile, said he was carrying a concealed weapon and allegedly reached for his wallet. His girlfriend, sitting in the passenger seat as he bled out beside her, live- USA TODAY/REUTERS streamed the aftermath on social media.
Protests of the Black Lives Matter movement erupted across the country, their tone and message not unlike those that followed the deaths of other black men at the hands of police since 2012.
On Thursday night, one such demonstration took over downtown Dallas, a rally 800-people strong and monitored by throngs of police. Marchers chanted ‘‘no justice, no peace’’ and ‘‘hands up, don’t shoot.’’ Then, gunfire rang out. And just like the shootings that had inspired the demonstration in the first place, portions of this atrocity were also captured on video, the horror of it all unfolding intimately, and live, on Facebook, Periscope, Twitter and Instagram.
Video footage from witnesses shows police officers taking cover behind their cars. The sound of rapid gunfire meshed with screams and sirens.
Most chilling was a clip of what appears to be a gunman, armed with some type of semiautomatic rifle, swiftly manoeuvring between building pillars on a downtown Dallas footpath before cornering an officer and shooting him.
‘‘Tonight’s assassinations undermine our democracy and were an attack on us all,’’ Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti tweeted early Friday morning. ‘‘We cannot let hate spread like a disease in our country.’’ Washington Post