This is absolutely horrible - an awful response to an awful situation. It's a tragedy on top of a tragedy - though it would be inexcusable for people to use it to detract from the awfulness of the earlier shootings.
But it's interesting in some ways beyond it's awfulness. Dallas is a wildly segregated city, with Downtown north to Plano being affluent and heavily White/Asian American, while south Dallas is fairly poor and largely Black and Latino. This is interesting because it brings the situation to a place where both crime and police shootings are part of a sort of collective vision of "elsewhere" - even if south Dallas is only a few miles away, it's somewhere very different than Downtown and places northward. I've spent a lot of time in this part of Dallas, in office towers, hotels, museums, and fancy restaurants. My company's Dallas office, where I spent all last summer, is about half a mile north of this shooting. It's the sort of place you don't associate with policy brutality, crime, poverty, or racial tension. I think what this abhorrent shooting brings home, then, is that there is a huge problem of racial tension, oppression, and brutality in this country, and it's not something that those of us who live in areas relatively sheltered from it can put out of mind.
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