“Officer down!” an officer screamed frantically into his police radio Sunday morning in Baton Rouge. “Shots fired! Officer down!”
One of the most dreaded calls in policing triggered a surge of officers to the city’s Airline Highway, not far from Police Headquarters, an agonizing replay of the distress calls 10 days earlier that prompted the Dallas police to scramble to the aid of their fallen colleagues, The New York Times reports.
The twin attacks—three officers dead Sunday in Baton Rouge, five killed on July 7 in Dallas, along with at least 12 injured over all—have set off a period of fear, anguish and confusion among the nation’s 900,000 state and local law enforcement officers. Even the most hardened veterans call this one of the most charged moments of policing they have experienced.
Officers from Seattle to New Orleans are pairing up in squad cars for added safety and keeping their eyes open for snipers while walking posts. It is an anxious time: Officers must handle not only vocal denunciations from peaceful protesters who criticize abusive policing, but also physical attacks by a tiny few on the periphery.
Law enforcement officials said it had been generations since the nation endured two separate episodes in which so many police officers were killed.
“We’ve seen nothing like this at all,” Darrel W. Stephens, the executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association and an instructor at the Public Safety Leadership Program at Johns Hopkins University, tells The New York Times. “The average officer in America, who was tense anyway, their tension and vigilance is going to increase even more. Police officers have always been vulnerable, and they know it. But somewhere inside you, you didn’t think it would happen. But now we’re seeing it happen.”
The man who killed two police officers and a sheriff’s deputy in Baton Rouge was a former Marine sergeant who served in Iraq and had no known ties to any extremist groups, The Associated Press reports.
Gavin Eugene Long, a black man whose last known address was in Kansas City, Missouri, carried out the attack on his 29th birthday. Police say he was seeking out law enforcement and ambushed them, wounding three other officers before he was killed in the latest in a string of violent incidents involving police.
Oren Segal, director of the Center on Extremism for the Anti-Defamation League, tells The Associated Press there was no information linking Long to any known extremist group or movement, but the ADL and others were investigating Long’s possible use of aliases.
Multiple media reports have identified the slain officers as Montrell Jackson, 32, and Matthew Gerald, 41, of the Baton Rouge Police Department; and Brad Garafola, a 45-year-old deputy with the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office.
Meanwhile, Louisiana State Police Supt. Col. Mike Edmonson tells NBC News the gunman did not lure the officers to their deaths, but instead carried out the ambush after a member of the public called 911.
“It was someone who was calling in,” Edmonson says, adding that there “was no indication” that the initial call was “trying to lure someone here.”
The governor has scheduled a 2 p.m. press conference today to update the situation and potentially release more information.
