Columnist Dan Rodricks asked some good questions about what happened to Freddie Gray ("Video of Gray arrest begs faster answers to troubling questions," April 20).
Why did police stop him? What explains his apparently painful condition, as seen in the citizen-captured video of his arrest, when he was led to a police wagon? Why does it look to some as if he were being carried or dragged rather than walking of his own accord, as police say he was capable of doing? And why, given that anomaly, are police still saying there's no evidence of violence during the arrest?
None of this inspires confidence. I have been watching this stuff for more than 50 years, starting with Police Chief Bull Connor and his ilk in Birmingham, Ala.
Chicago, the city of my birth, won the dubious distinction of being the first city in the U.S. to be cited by Amnesty International for police torture, and that was more than a decade after its police slaughtered Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.
People have been beaten and killed with impunity all my life, and I am tired. Billy Murphy, the attorney for Freddie Gray's family, got it right: Running while black is not probable cause for an arrest, much less for taking the life of a suspect.
Even if there had been a reasonable belief that a crime had been committed, there was no excuse for multiple officers using such force to subdue a small man like Mr. Gray. If police aren't competent to perform a simple arrest without seriously harming the suspect, they don't belong on the street.
Katharine W. Rylaarsdam, Baltimore