Over the next three hours, a growing law enforcement group that included a crisis negotiation team and tactical operations experts encircled the suspect. He refused to leave the van, so they engaged him in dialog. At 8:37 p.m., the suspect, Marcel King, a 34-year-old Black man, exited the van without his machete and surrendered.

Police officers responding to an auto burglary in progress here last week found the suspect sitting in the back of a Ford van with a machete in hand.

“By isolating the scene, calling for back-up and generally de-escalating the situation, we got a peaceful resolution,” said Lt. Michael Nevin, who heads training at the San Francisco Police Department’s Field Tactics Force Options Unit. “No-news incidents are the great-news incidents.”

Those deaths and others have sparked renewed calls for law enforcement training that focuses on serving all members of a community, especially people of color vulnerable because of systemic racism, and puts a premium on de-escalation tactics that minimize violence. But experts say a patchwork approach to police reform has left the nation at a critical crossroad with no clear path forward.

“With 18,000 police agencies and 80% of them having fewer than 50 officers, that is no national way for them to get best practices,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a non-profit that provides resources for police officials. “And the training in de-escalation hasn’t fundamentally changed in 25 years.”

One way to de-escalate tension in confrontations is to change the rules of engagement, experts said. For example, each year around 100 knife-wielding people are killed by police, who can fire upon such suspects if they come within 21 feet, said Rajiv Sethi, professor of economics at Barnard College in New York and co-author of “Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime and the Pursuit of Justice.”

Police responded to the FedEx Ground facility on the city’s southwest side just after 11 p.m. Thursday for a report of shots fired at a business. There was an “active shooter” situation when officers arrived, said Genae Cook, spokesman for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.

At least eight people were killed in a shooting late Thursday at a FedEx facility near Indianapolis International Airport, authorities said.

Eight people are dead and multiple people were injured and were hospitalized. At least one person remained in critical condition at 3 a.m. Friday. Other injured people took themselves to hospitals in the area, Cook said.

Police established a family unification center at the Holiday Inn a mile from the warehouse, for those that had not heard from loved ones. The New York Times reported FedEx has a policy that employees must give up their phones before beginning work on the floor.

Several hours after the shooting, family members sat in the hotel lobby waiting to hear if their loved ones who worked at the ground facility were OK. Some had pajamas on. One man had a sleeping child covered in a blanket on his shoulder. They wore masks to protect themselves from COVID-19.

The suburb’s police station was barricaded behind concrete barriers and tall metal fencing, watched over by police in riot gear and National Guard soldiers with armored vehicles and assault rifles. One video showed one protester carrying the head of a fake pig on a pole near a fence outside the heavily guarded station.

Demonstrators gathered outside the Brooklyn Center police headquarters Wednesday demanding justice and accountability for the fourth night in a row over the fatal shooting of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, by a police officer earlier this week.

Before the night’s protests, Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott urged people to protest without violence, saying “your voices have been heard.”

Earlier, police fired rubber bullets into the crowd. Casey Clements, 30, was shot in the waist while by the fence. 

“That’ll add to the zip-tie bruises I got the other night,” he told USA TODAY as he was tended to by a medic, referring to his arrest Monday night. 

He added that he’s a student who is protesting “because I feel like I need to protect the people here,” he said, gesturing to the other protesters.

Potter, the officer who fatally shot Wright at a traffic stop on Sunday, is a 26-year veteran of the Brooklyn Center Police Department. She was arrested Wednesday and charged with second-degree manslaughter, officials said.

On Wednesday, some of his extended family came to the intersection where he was shot, carefully rearranging the lawn of flowers that had been left there in his memory or sobbing as they sat in the grass. 

“He had a 2-year-old son that’s not going to be able to play basketball with him. He had sisters and brothers that he loved so much,” his mother, Katie Wright, said Tuesday on “Good Morning America.”

An Ohio State University student from northwestern Ohio was arrested for hitting a police sergeant with a wooden club. The protest was peaceful up until then, police said.