There was not fire this time. Rather there's been an eerily muted response since a plainclothes detective shot a fleeing 14-year-old boy whose fake gun he mistook for the real thing in East Baltimore a week ago.
The boy, Dedric Colvin, was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital for gunshot wounds to a shoulder and a leg. He did not become this city's Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Cleveland boy shot to death by a police officer who overreacted when he saw the boy playing with a toy gun in a playground. The City of Cleveland has recently agreed to pay Tamir's family $6 million to settle a lawsuit.
Here, exactly one year after a violent conflagration followed the funeral of Freddie Gray, detectives confronted a boy with a basketball in one hand and a BB gun in the other, a kid who in a more innocent time may have been immortalized as quintessentially American in a Norman Rockwell-style painting.
This was not a grown man strapped with a fake bomb threatening to detonate it at a television station. That happened the day after Dedric was shot. Nor was this a grown man pointing a 9mm handgun at a police officer sitting in a cruiser in what appeared to be an attempt at suicide-by-cop. That happened Sunday. In both of these instances, the men were properly shot by police officers.
But Dedric Colvin is a child, an 8th grader at City Springs Middle School. The question his older brother Alvin asked a police major on the scene is the question I, too, have: "If he's not pointing it at the police, why do they got the right to shoot?"
On talk radio and in social media, his mother, Volanda Young, has been pilloried for "allowing" Dedric to leave the house with a toy gun, whether it looked real or not. And Dedric has been castigated for failing to drop the gun and for running.
The fact that the gun looked real has hampered a discussion that should be taking place among city leaders. "You don't see a lot of conversation around the nature of the interaction the officers had, whether that was appropriate. It's hard to even get to a place where you can even ask those questions in certain company because the images of the gun resonate so much," observes Dayvon Love, an activist with the grassroots thinktank Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle.
But ask, we must.
Only a few dozen people answered the call by Baltimore Bloc to protest the shooting last Friday. And Tessa Hill Aston, president of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP, is willing to cut the police officers some slack because the gun looked real. "They are just normal people with a gun," she says. "Some of the police are just as scared as we would be."
Police Commissioner Kevin Davis thinks his hard work at repairing relations between the police department and city residents is paying off: A police-involved shooting of a teenager a year or so ago "would have garnered a different type of community response," he told me.
So maybe some of us have reached a kind of can-we-all-get-along milestone in Baltimore. But on behalf of the rest of us, I say: Not so fast. Policing in Baltimore, especially in certain neighborhoods, is still problematic.
Mr. Davis has offered a measured response. He has explained how a reasonable person — whether a police officer, a journalist or a religious leader invited to look at it — could mistake Dedric's Daisy brand Power Line Model 340 spring-air pistol, easily available from Walmart or Amazon, for a very real semiautomatic Beretta 92 FS pistol. Mr. Davis has also acknowledged that while kids will be kids, white kids are given the benefit of the doubt where black kids are not. Kids like his own 13-year-olds. "If they had a gun in their hand, would it be perceived differently? Yeah, I'd be the first one to admit that," the commissioner said in a panel discussion at Morgan State University Saturday.
While he said that neither Dedric nor his mother would face air gun-related charges, one might say that, as the Rev. Heber Brown 3d told me, when Dedric was shot, "he'd already been charged and found guilty on the spot while running away."
Cops need to see black kids as kids. We grownup civilians need to see black kids as kids and exercise our adult privilege to drop some wisdom on them before they put themselves in harm's way. A kid with a basketball in one hand and a BB gun in the other should end up at the recreation center — not hospital or, worse, the grave.
E.R. Shipp, a Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary, is the journalist in residence at Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communication. Her column runs every other Wednesday. Email: er.shipp@aol.com.