The Washington Post reports: The police chief here said Monday he feels that law enforcement officers across the country are being asked to take on too much, comments that came as his department was still investigating the mass shooting of Dallas police officers last week and protesters in other cities continued demonstrations against how officers use force.

Even as the Dallas police worked to sift through massive amounts of evidence from the shooting rampage that killed five officers — an effort that entails watching hundreds of hours of videos and conducting scores of interviews — David Brown, the Dallas police chief, said he believes officers in his city and nationwide are under too much strain.

“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country,” Brown said at a briefing Monday. “We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops. That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.” [Continue reading…]

Donald Trump’s response to recent events has been to announce that he is “the law and order candidate.” As is his standard practice, he offered no policy details on what this means.

Huffington Post reports: By declaring himself the “law and order” candidate, however, Trump has ripped a page from the campaign playbook of Richard Nixon, who successfully ran for the presidency in 1968 as the “law and order” candidate. Trump has also cribbed the Nixonian phrase “silent majority” to describe his supporters ― who, like Nixon’s, are largely white and middle class. [Continue reading…]