After Dallas violence, Clark County sheriff urges community to say ‘not in our city’

Community leaders pleaded for peace during a gathering at Metropolitan Police Department headquarters Friday in response to the previous night’s violence in Dallas.

“History has told us that, when violence becomes the answer to a problem, we have lost our humanity,” Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said. “The events last night in Dallas show a lack of humanity.”

Five Dallas police officers were fatally shot and seven wounded by a lone gunman near the end of a protest over the deaths of black men killed by police this week in Louisiana and Minnesota. Authorities said Army veteran Micah Johnson, 25, was ​killed by Dallas police with a robot-delivered bomb after the shootings.

Lombardo said the Dallas officers were “defending and protecting the First Amendment rights of the citizens” when they were targeted.

“This act was no different than the acts of ISIS where Christians or gays are targeted,” Lombardo said. “We want the entire community to stand up and say, ‘Not in our city.’

“We cannot ignore the two incidents that sparked the protest, the officer-involved shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota. Many of us have seen the video clips of the incidents, but we are far from knowing the entire story. That’s what investigations are for. I ask each and everyone of us … let the process work its way through before we form those opinions.”

Lombardo and other leaders who gathered Friday said that, although Southern Nevada has not seen protests as large as other cities — including Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore; and New York City — the Las Vegas community still needs to come together in the wake of the Dallas shootings.

Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, Clark County Commissioners Lawrence Weekly and Steve Sisolak, and District Attorney Steve Wolfson joined Lombardo in emphasizing the need for peace.

Weekly thanked the sheriff for allowing him to speak unscripted and gave an impassioned speech.

“As an African-American man, I’ll tell you that my heart cries out right now,” Weekly said. “As an African-American man who’s raising an African-American young man, my heart cries out right now. … My heart cries out to the families over in Minnesota and of course my heart to all my family and friends that live in Dallas, Texas, who I’ve been speaking with and are just mortified as to what’s going on in our country.”

Weekly highlighted the issues that were at the heart of the protests in Dallas, and he called for peace and mutual respect.

“I’m so heartbroken right now to see what’s going on here in America,” he said. “Enough is enough is enough. … No more bloodshed in the streets of America.”

For Las Vegas police, the events across the nation have highlighted the importance of Metro’s many multicultural programs and community outreach. But the issue was more complicated for members of the black community.

Alcinia Whiters, 34, said she was shaken by the widely shared videos of the police shootings.

Whiters, born and raised in Las Vegas, stressed there are professional and unprofessional officers, but that racial profiling does happen here. The African-American woman added that seeing the videos of people being pulled over for routine traffic stops and then killed made her nervous.

“Now you have a visual in your mind to carry with you,” Whiters said. “Any black person I know, myself included, I worry.”

Colin Seale, 33, said he remembers growing up in Brooklyn during Rudy Giuliani’s term as mayor of New York and being stopped and frisked at age 15.

An attorney and educator who has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, Seale said he has participated in workshops for local minority youth to teach them their rights and how to navigate interactions with police.

“In 2016, we still have to sit down and have these talks with young people,” Seale said.

After seeing the video taken moments after the police shooting of 32-year-old Philando Castile in Minnesota, Seale said his first instinct was to pick up and hold his 9-month-old son.

“I’m not sure that by the time he’s a teenager it’s really going to change a lot, so I’ve just got to hold him,” he said.

Seale cautioned against connecting the shootings of the Dallas police officers with the Black Lives Matter movement.

“What’s going on with Dallas, I believe that any sort of violence like that is completely uncalled for,” he said.

The tragedy in Dallas and the national debate over policing and race are likely to reverberate into this weekend’s worship services.

The Rev. Dennis Hutson, pastor of Advent United Methodist Church, 3460 N. Rancho Drive, has included in services a prayer for police officers, first responders and military personnel. The former military chaplain said he is concerned about a national “tension that seems to exist between the police and the community that they serve.”

“We need each other. We do need our police to enforce the law and protect us, but at the same time we need our police forces to have a healthy respect and appreciation for the residents that they have been entrusted to serve and protect,” he said.

Ultimately, Hutson said, the answer lies in “seeing (police) as human beings so they may see us as human beings. And I think if we can do that, it would be a whole lot better.”

Bishop Dan Edwards of the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada said he will issue a message to diocesan churches encouraging a focus on, first, “the general epidemic of fear within the country and how fear leads to violence.”

Edwards said he has heard within the community “opinions right across the spectrum,” from those “who deny that race is still an issue” to “those who see race as so deep a divide that it is intractable and they fear being able to do anything about it.”

“But in between are a lot of folks who see racism as a historic and social wound and that it’s our mission to heal as best we can,” Edwards said. “And we know, those of us in the middle, that it’s not going to be healed in a generation. But unless we are working actively toward moving forward, it’s just going to get worse instead of better.”

At Metro’s Best of the Badge Gala on Friday night at Red Rock Resort, the mood went from upbeat to somber as a moment of silence was held to remember the fallen Dallas officers.

“As far as the Dallas incident, it’s a horrible thing that happened; my heart goes out to those families, those officers,” Metro officer Greg Sedminik said prior to the event.

Greg Sedminik, recipient of Metro’s Medal of Valor and Purple Heart, knows firsthand about violence toward police officers. While responding to a domestic violence incident at an apartment complex last December, he was approached by a man who produced a firearm and shot him. The bullet entered his bicep and exited through the back of his torso, breaking several ribs.

“I used to joke around and say that I’ve seen it all,” Sedminik said. “But you’ve never seen it all.”

The Associated Press and writers Christian Bertolaccini, Alexander S. Corey and John Przybys contributed to this report. Contact Wesley Juhl at wjuhl@reviewjournal.com and 702-383-0391. Find @WesJuhl on Twitter.