Stephen A. Smith on Dallas Cowboys’ Tribute to Dallas PD: If You Respect the Law, Why Don’t You Obey It?

On Saturday, the Dallas Cowboys walked arm-in-arm onto the field for the start of their training camp with families of the Dallas police officers killed by a gunman last month.

During Monday’s “First Take” on ESPN2, co-host Stephen A. Smith reacted to the Cowboys’ tribute, telling the team littered with off-field transgressions to obey the law and be more authentic if they truly respect the law.

“My problem with the Dallas Cowboys is we live in a world where we constantly talk about being role models. In this particular situation, I’m incredibly serious because I had our researcher David Sabino pull up a couple of situations involving the Dallas Cowboys. This is a list,” Smith said as he showed a list of numerous recent Cowboys players’ arrests and off-field incidents.

Smith later added, “I’m saying that if you are America’s team, if you are the team with the star on your helmet, playing in that billion dollar playpen, et cetera, et cetera, I don’t blame you one bit for doing what you did yesterday, in terms of locking arms, taking the picture, obviously what happened was in Dallas. We understand the correlation there. Clearly while you don’t wish this on anybody and you know that the Dallas Cowboys, as an organization, as individual players and beyond as a fan base, nobody wishes anything like this to happen, not if you’ve got any kind of decency within yourself. It just took me back a second and said, ‘You know what, if you have so much respect for the law why don’t you try obeying it as an organization?'”

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