Attacks on police: Inspired or directed by militant groups?

The Black Lives Matter Twitter emoji is back.

After El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen called Black Lives Matter a “radical hate group”, 13 area leaders called on the mayor and city council to repudiate his comments. The attack that took the lives of five Dallas officers will haunt police, buttressing the perception that they are besieged by a hostile populace.

Three tumultuous days have brought echoes of decades past and made clear a public that elected a black president hasn’t reconciled its fractured history with race, that a country that lived through unrest and assassinations in the 1960s and 1970s still bubbles with resentment and rage, and that bloody images of violent tragedy aren’t going away. “If the shooter is black, our entire movement pays”.

The Dallas ambush by a black gunman targeting white police is the latest spasm of fury that reflects what experts see as a rising tide of extremism and intolerance on the fringes of American society. In Philadelphia, people planned a “Weekend of Rage” over perceived injustice, while in Atlanta, marchers demonstrated peacefully for hours Friday night.

The protests erupted initially after videos surfaced showing fatal police encounters with two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, in Louisiana and Minnesota, respectively.

Protesters in Rochester, New York, sat in the street chanting “black lives, black lives”.

Dressed in riot gear, the police officers attempted to move protesters who were in an intersection in downtown Rochester. He also said that some protestors threw rocks at police during the incident.

“I was beaten bloody by police officers”.

Taylor was one of two civilians wounded in the attack, which killed five Dallas officers and injured seven others.

“They are out there visibly in that blue uniform, and last night they were targeted for wearing that blue uniform”.

Police used crowd control measures including smoke, police spokesman Steve Linders said.

“One of the great things about America is that individual citizens and groups of citizens can petition their government, can protest, can speak truth to power, and that is sometimes messy, and controversial”.

In Phoenix, confrontations broke out between protesters and police when police tried to block the crowd from marching onto the freeway by forming a human shield, according to a statement from the Phoenix Police Department.

Affiliate video showed several protesters affected by the pepper spray covering their eyes and faces, sprawled on the ground in pain.

Obama also cautions that if protesters paint police with a broad brush, they could lose allies for their cause. Police say Kemonte Gilmore flashes a handgun in the video and talks about the slayings of Castile and Sterling.

Garza explained to Hayes that BLM has never endorsed the vengeful killing of police officers and once again hammered home the group’s message that the harming of authorities is a condemnable offense.

“I feel like more people should step up and have a march and more people would come together”, said Jones, who will study criminal justice at Bakersfield College in the fall.

Davis and his associates insist on peaceful protests as a means to an end, and indeed, most protests across the US have gone on without a hint of violence.

Taylor says she always held police officers “in a very high place” and notes that her youngest son wants to be a cop.

Around 300 people have taken to the streets in south London as a mark of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. A reporter for CNN affiliate WPLG tweeted that demonstrators had blocked a major thoroughfare.