Dallas Police Chief David Brown gave a press conference today and showed what a great leader he is. This is the guy who has helped reduce the violent crime rate in his city to its lowest level in 50 years. He’s accomplished that through community policing policies that should be a model for every other city in the country. They should all contact Brown — after this calms down in Dallas — and ask him how he’s done what he’s done.
Brown also emphasized how cops are burdened with too many responsibilities other than fighting crime, mostly because municipalities and states have cut taxes so much that they can’t afford to offer mental health services, better schools, help for drug addiction, etc.
I also liked what Chief Brown said when asked about the man who was initially named a “person of interest” because he was marching in the Black Lives Matter parade Thursday night in Dallas with a long rifle slung over his shoulder — which is legal because of the state’s idiotic open carry law:
It’s a little different here in Texas in the way we view open carry, concealed carry. We’ve had great dialogue with our state legislators about this. We’ve expressed all of our concerns. We are trying as best as we can as a law enforcement community to make it work so the citizens can express their Second Amendment rights. But it’s increasingly challenging when people have AR-15s slung over and shootings occur in a crowd and they begin running, and we don’t know — or we don’t know if they’re the shooter or not, or they begin, it’s been the presumption that a good guy with a gun is the best way to resolve some of these things. Well, we don’t know who the good guy is versus who the bad guy is if everybody starts shooting, and we’ve expressed that concern as well.