Dallas sniper had planned a larger attack, says police chief

Risk to police Given the risk to police officers, he said he “would do it again if presented with the same circumstances”.

He said Johnson had scrawled the letters “RB” in his own blood on a wall before dying. “Just hoopin'”, Cooper said.

Johnson was killed by a police robot bomb after he attacked officers at a demonstration in downtown Dallas protesting recent shootings of black men by police.

Police agencies across the USA are on edge and on guard after receiving threats and calls for violence against them on social media in the aftermath of the killings of two black men and the sniper attack that left five officers dead in Dallas. “He was going to target law enforcement and make us pay”.

Dallas police said Sunday that neither they nor the Federal Bureau of Investigation would confirm that photographs circulating on the internet – two pictures that show an assault rifle in rubble and the bloodied body of a black man wearing an armored vest amid building debris – were from the parking garage.

Brown said he became increasingly concerned that “at a split second, he would charge us and take out many more before we would kill him”.

“We had negotiated with him for about two hours, and he just basically lied to us – playing games, laughing at us, singing, asking how many (police officers) did he get and that he wanted to kill some more and that there were bombs there”, Brown said, “so there was no progress on the negotiation”. So I was, “Nah, it’s probably another Xavier somewhere, you know'”, Cooper said.

Despite noticing a change in behavior, Micah Johnson’s mother and stepmother said they could not think of any specific event in the military that may have led to this behavior.

Police have arrested about 100 people in St. Paul during protests of the recent police killings of black men, including one outside Minnesota’s capital city.

The Dallas police chief also sought to explain initial confusion that resulted in the arrests of three “suspects” who turned out not to be involved in the shooting.

The details made for significant new disclosures about the killings that have rocked the Dallas community and the nation.

President Barack Obama urged Americans on Saturday not to view the United States as being riven into opposing groups, seeking to soothe raw emotions after a former USA soldier killed five policemen in Dallas and high-profile police shootings of two black men in Minnesota and Louisiana.

The past week’s violence – the black deaths, and then Dallas – have shocked a country seemingly inured to its epidemic of gun violence and injected new urgency into the national debate on race relations and how white police forces deal with black suspects.

When officials descended upon the home of Micah X. Johnson, who on Thursday night helped assassinate Dallas police offers in a deadly massacre, they found a cache of weapons, according to a Dallas police statement issued Friday afternoon.

Chief William McManus says investigators are trying to determine whether the building was targeted Saturday night or if someone was randomly firing. Brown also said that Dallas police are taking all threats seriously in the wake of the shootings.

“There’s lots of possibilities but RBG makes the most sense given Johnson’s Black Power interests and what motivated him to carry out these attacks”, a source said, as reported by the Daily Mail.

“So we can not let the actions of a few define all of us”, Obama said from Warsaw, Poland, where he attended a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit.

Officials have also notified surrounding police agencies, fire departments and emergency medical services.

Video showed protesters marching along a downtown street about half a mile from City Hall when shots erupted and the crowd scattered, seeking cover.

“We’re convinced that this suspect had other plans”, he added.