![Dallas Police Chief: Cops Across America Feel Like They Are Under Attack [VIDEO]](https://images.dailycaller.com/image/width=960,height=411,fit=cover,f=auto/https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Dallas-Police-Chief-Malik-Aziz-Screen-Grab-CNN-7-8-2016-e1467992632486.jpg "Dallas Police Chief: Cops Across America Feel Like They Are Under Attack [VIDEO]")
Deputy Chief Malik Aziz of the Dallas Police Department said on Friday that police officers across America feel like they are “under siege.”
In the aftermath of five police officers being killed and seven wounded by sniper fire on Thursday, CNN’s John Berman host of “At This Hour with Berman and Boludan asked if he felt police officers across the nation were under attack or felt “under siege.” (RELATED: Police: Dallas Suspect ‘Upset About Black Lives Matter,’ ‘Wanted To Kill White People’)
Aziz replied, “Well, I think across the nation, officers are feeling under siege.” (RELATED: Dead Shooter Identified, 3 Suspects In Custody After Killing 5 Officers, Wound 7 Others At Dallas Anti-Police Protest)
“[W]e say that 98% of us do it right,” Aziz said. Noting that there is a big push for a “community policing effort, a direction of interaction and engagement. And we do these things in this city and across the nation and we try to do them right.”
“We try to strive for perfection but sometimes we make errors. Sometimes things don’t go the way they should. And we should be held accountable. And that is what we have a criminal justice system for. So we can be held accountable. So officers across the nation, it means so much when someone says ‘thank you’ or we appreciate what you do because officers don’t hear that.”
Later, Aziz said, “[O]ur officers who go out with the expectation they may not come home again to their family of loved ones… they feel underappreciated. And what we need now is a real engagement. A real dialogue with the community.”
“We can no longer be separate. We can’t divide ourselves. The community needs the police and the police need the community. We are one and the same. We have a 50/50 partnership and we have to sit at the table to see what is the best way forward and we’re not doing that.”
“We have devolved into some separatism and we’ve taken our corners… in every avenue in the United States,” Aziz said. “We don’t seem to want to work together.”