He said he was hugging officers whenever he could. He gave blunt answers to questions about race: "I've been black a long time, man."
And he spoke about his officers living on crummy salaries (US$44,000 to start in Dallas, about NZ$60,607) while society placed more and more burdens on them: drug addiction, failures in mental health treatment, even stray dogs.
The nomination process immediately commenced.
There was this Lady Gaga tweet and reply:
His delegates piled up.
His support seemed bipartisan:
Even political commentators and reporters got behind the idea:
Brown certainly has a compelling life story to tell from the stump.
His brother, son and former partner have been killed. He knows what victims go through. And he knows how to lead.
"There are some people who would just shut down, and they would have others conducting the interviews," Keith Humphrey, the police chief of Norman, Oklahoma, told my colleague Theresa Vargas.
"But that is not David. He realised the community wants to hear from him. The nation wants to hear from him."
And he was brutally honest about what people could do to help.
"Get off that protest line," he said, "and put an application in."
