Activists walk a fine, painful line in wake of Dallas shooting

In the wake of the Dallas shooting on Thursday, activists found themselves having to walk a fine line between mourning the deaths of five police officers and maintaining the recent momentum of the movement to address police violence.

"This is a tragedy – both for those who have been impacted by yesterday’s attack and for our democracy," Black Lives Matter said in a statement. "There are some who would use these events to stifle a movement for change and quicken the demise of a vibrant discourse on the human rights of Black Americans. We should reject all of this."

The frustration evident in that statement comes after an especially violent end to what had already been a very bloody week that included graphic images dispersed on social media. The topic of police violence toward black men had re-emerged as one of the most pressing social issues facing U.S. citizens.

Dallas had the makings of being an ideal protest among the many planned on Thursday by activists seeking to draw attention to police brutality, in particular the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. 

It would be a march against violence in coordination with a police department that had become a model for reducing police violence.

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A few hours after that photo was taken, five Dallas law enforcement officers would be dead, shot by a suspect that allegedly said he was out to kill white people, singling out white cops. 

Shifting the conversation

By Friday morning, the shooting dominated the national discussion, a distinct shift from the one about how police treated black people. By the end of Friday, those critiques had eased as many mourned for the officers that lost their lives. 

The sequence of events reminded Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA and Columbia Law School as well as a civil rights advocate, of the shooting of two New York Police Department officers. 

They were killed in the aftermath of the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in separate police incidents. Those shootings helped jumpstart the Black Lives Matter movement.  

The movement, she recalled, was never quite the same after the deaths of those officers.

"It may be paranoia but I'm remembering how quickly the mass demonstration in the Eric Garner case was silenced after two officers were killed," Crenshaw wrote in a public Facebook post.

"The righteous rage about police killings of our people has barely mounted and now this."

"The righteous rage about police killings of our people has barely mounted and now this. I fear that everyone who sympathized with victims of police violence will be blamed. Many may walk it back. Media will tap down the injustice to honor the fallen police. Trump will rise. Justice will be lost. Unless a miracle happens," Crenshaw continued.

It seemed that those fears were in some part already coming true.

Pointing fingers

Just hours after the American public realized the extent of the horror in downtown Dallas, the shooting was already being attributed to the Black Lives Matter and the broader efforts to address police violence.

Ex-Congressman Joe Walsh (now a nationally syndicated radio host) tweeted "This is now War" in the hours immediately after shots first rang out, adding a veiled threat at President Barack Obama. The tweet has since been deleted, although many others with just as much vitriol remain.

Some on the right collected the few voices that publicly celebrated the killings, pointing to them as evidence that the movement to address police violence was about perpetrating violence on the police.

Others, including some responding to a Facebook post about the shooting by Donald Trump, talked of a race war. 

Others in the media were clearly ready to capitalize on the perceived rift. 

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Journalist and activist Rosa Clemente, also posting to Facebook publicly, said that she worried about increased divisions between activists and those who opposed their calls for police oversight.

"Everything changed last night, it does not matter if you roll with Black Lives Matter or despise Black Lives Matter, call yourself a revolutionary or conservative, Ph.D or did not finish high school or if you were formally incarcerated or never been near a jail," Clemente wrote. "If you reside in a Black and Brown body after last night everyone of us has a target on our backs and not just by police but also by vigilantes, white nationalists and supremacists. Be careful family, stay alert."

For the moment, there does not seem to be any slowdown in the Black Lives Matter movement. One event scheduled for Hunstville, Alabama, was set to go on as scheduled Friday night but it was also being held in partnership with the city and its police department. It had planned to include a vigil for the officers that died in Dallas as well as for Sterling and Castile. 

Other events are scheduled for Atlanta, Detroit and New Haven, Connecticut. There's no shortage of smaller events that can be found on Facebook.

Where will the media focus?

As for the media, most news outlets had understandably been going heavy on coverage of the Dallas shooting.

The question moving forward is whether journalists will turn back to cover the cases of Castile and Sterling once most of the news has come out about what happened in Dallas.

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There is some hope that the topic of police violence has grown too engrained in the national discussion to completely fade. 

Hillary Clinton in an interview with CNN on Friday showed little hesitation to continue discussing the issue of police violence, even going as far as suggesting national guidelines for policing.

"Too many African-Americans have been killed in encounters with police," she said. "We’ve got to do a lot more to bring the police together with the communities that they protect."

And if the presumptive democratic nominee wasn't enough, even Newt Gingrich -- who is reportedly being considered for the vice president spot on the Donald Trump ticket -- came out on Friday and sounded, well, like a part of the Black Lives Matter movement.

"It took me a long time, and a number of people talking to me through the years to get a sense of this,” Gingrich said during a Facebook Live event. "If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk."

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