Dehvon Davies remembers the mood of last Thursday’s protest in Dallas, right before shots rang out that would lead to the deaths of five police officers.
“Most of the people who kind of seemed like citizens, like your regular person who came to join, were very calm,” says Davies, who identifies as multiracial and grew up in a suburb of Dallas. The speakers, on the other hand, “were very passionate, and they shared personal experiences, which they were angry about and you could see that.”
While some protesters posed for photos with police that day, about 20 to 30 participants marched through downtown with AR-15s and other military-grade rifles in the open-carry state of Texas. Dallas, like many U.S. urban centers, is extremely segregated, and so too is residents’ trust in the local police and their department’s reform agenda.
Davies’s recollection of the simultaneous calm and anger at the march points to the wide variety of experiences locals have had with the Dallas Police Department. For Dallas residents, which feelings the police provoke largely depend on what part of the city they grew up in.
[For more of this story, written by George Joseph, go to http://www.citylab.com/crime/2...l-for-reform/490610/]
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