Reacting to the shooting of eighth-grader Dedric Colvin by a Baltimore police officer, the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland seemed to say, without stating it directly, that the boy never would have been chased or shot if he had been white or in a largely white community.
"Fourteen-year-old boys play with BB guns all over the country every day without getting shot by police," the ACLU said in a statement. "It dehumanizes Black children when law enforcement and our society so quickly seek to justify a shoot-to-kill response when a Black child in East Baltimore does the same thing."
Apparently, the ACLU believes that, in a different place — say, a white suburban or rural area — a police officer would have had an entirely different reaction.
An officer in such a place never would have suspected that a 14-year-old boy was carrying anything but a BB gun or toy, even if it was ridiculously realistic like the one police say Dedric carried Wednesday afternoon. In this alternate scenario, an officer would have gone about his business; he might have given the BB-gun-toting middle-schooler the thumbs-up as he drove by.
(According to police, Dedric is 13; his family says he is 14.)
I am sure many police officers in predominantly white, middle class or affluent communities would disagree with that, given the number of guns commonly used to cause pain and death across the continent. Some, if not most, of our worst mass shootings have been carried out by young, white men in suburban areas. Officers in those communities who are not by now vigilant for suspicious firearms would be considered derelict.
But, getting back to Baltimore, still one of the most violent cities in the country, the ACLU statement, while making an important point about bias and the dehumanization of black boys and young men, fails to acknowledge another reality. During the week Dedric was shot, Baltimore experienced another surge in shootings, and by noon Saturday there had been 29 homicides in the last 30 days.
Citizens — black, white and otherwise — do not expect to live with this forever. We want a safer Baltimore, don't we? We expect the police to try to stop all the killing by making arrests, confiscating illegal firearms.
So, pulling Dedric's wounding by an officer out of the context of that reality — too many people shooting each other, police under constant pressure to make city neighborhoods safer — offers a simplistic takeaway from a complex and fraught situation.
Kevin Shird, a youth advocate in Baltimore, agrees with the ACLU statement, but he also sees a larger question raised by the wounding of Dedric Colvin: A need for better police training.
"To not be able to identify a 14-year-old kid from an adult criminal suspect is very problematic," Kevin Shird said. "During a 150-yard chase, they couldn't tell this was just a child? That's a real issue for me."
Shird is an ex-offender who spent 12 years in state and federal prisons for dealing drugs. Since then, he established a foundation to work with kids and spread a strong anti-drug message.
"I do understand the officers' hypersensitivity to seeing a perceived handgun in a violent environment like Baltimore," he said. "But that just enhances the point that more effective training is needed for officers to effectively do their jobs. There are a lot of bad things going on in the city by bad people. But also, within that environment, there are a lot of innocent people."
There's a clear racial and experiential divide here, and the fact that Dedric ran from police underscores, among other things, the need to build trust between cops and kids from a young age.
The ACLU has always been correct about this: Where a child lives makes a difference. For years now, the Maryland chapter of the civil rights organization has been working to address the deplorable disparities in the way children, in particular, have been treated in this community: How they've been educated (compared to their wealthier, suburban peers) and where their parents have been allowed to rent or buy homes.
A long history of segregation has led to all kinds of inequities. As political power shifted to the suburbs, whole blocks of American cities were neglected by the nation's power establishment.
The battle over the regulation of firearms fell along the same fault lines; an epoch of gun violence in suburban and rural areas never would have been tolerated by the political class. And, as is clear from the recent reaction to the heroin epidemic, calls for more action — addiction treatment, overdose prevention, needle exchanges — take on greater urgency once a problem hits predominantly white areas of the country.
So, while it's tempting to see the wounding of Dedric Colvin as another example of racial profiling, or lack of trust, or the unnecessary use of force, I go beyond that. I see it as the depressing result of the Baltimore region's history of segregation, America's obsession with guns, and one part of the country's disregard for what happens in another.