When Dallas police killed the gunman Micah Johnson with a bomb-disposal robot Friday morning, Johnson became the first person killed by the city’s police in 2016.
That’s unusual. Of police departments in the 10 most populous cities in the US, the Dallas police department is the only one without a fatal shooting by officers so far this year.
And while the city is still reeling from the attack that left five officers dead, it has been heralded in recent years as a department willing to reform in a time of sharp criticism for police.
The department’s community policing initiatives and unusual transparency have been lauded by reform advocates amid a national conversation on US police killings and race.
“This police department trained in de-escalation far before cities across America did it,” the city’s mayor, Mike Rawlings, said on Friday morning. “We’re one of the premier community policing cities in the country and this year we have the fewest police officer-related shootings than any large city in America. But we are the best in class, we feel.”
Last year, Dallas police killed six people, according to the Counted, the Guardian’s database of police killings in 2015 and 2016. Johnson was killed with a bomb-disposal robot, in what is believed to be first time that US police have used a robot in a deadly force incident.
The peaceful protest where Johnson opened fire was organized after two black men were shot and killed by police within 48 hours. In Dallas, seven more officers and two civilians were wounded when Johnson opened fire, authorities said. Of the officers killed, four were Dallas police officers and the fifth was with the Dallas area rapid transit division.
Excessive force complaints against Dallas officers dropped by 64% between 2009 and 2014, the Dallas Morning News reported last year. Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told the paper that the department’s de-escalation training could serve other police forces. “We can learn from what Dallas is doing,” he said.
In addition to an apparent decrease in use-of-force incidents, Dallas police have been lauded for a level of transparency unusual among law enforcement. The department released 12 years of data on officer shootings in 2014 before debuting an initiative to release information about when officers use other types of force earlier this year.
Dallas police also had a hand in crafting a new law that requires all Texas law enforcement agencies to report fatal and nonfatal police shootings to the state’s attorney general. Texas is one of a handful of states that mandates reporting of fatal shootings. Complete and accurate data on civilians killed by law enforcement, which is not collected by any federal agency, is widely acknowledged by criminal justice reformers as a necessary first step to understanding and ultimately decreasing deadly use of force by police.
The law was drafted by state representative Eric Johnson in collaboration with Dallas, Austin and Houston police departments and the Dallas Police Association.
“Really every step of the way they were involved in the actual language of the legislation,” said Mary Elbanna, an Austin legislative staffer in Johnson’s office. “Dallas police department was essential.”
The department did weather criticism, and calls began for the police chief, David Brown, to step down earlier this year after the city saw an uptick in violent crime. After historic lows in 2014, the number of murders in the city increased 17% in 2015. Despite the increase, 2015 had the fourth-lowest murder rate since the city began counting in 1930, according to the Dallas Morning News.
