The article regarding the recent shooting of a 14-year old ("Police shooting of teen carrying BB gun prompts a small protest," April 30) mentions that the underlying point of the protest is that police are killing blacks at epidemic numbers but fails to provide the most recent figures of police fatal shootings (released by the FBI for the year 2012). Those statistics show that police shootings resulted in the deaths of 123 blacks and 326 whites. This fact would put perspective into the story.
I challenge the quote from the protest leader, Sharon Black, who stated, "If he [Dedric Colvin] had been white and wealthy, police would have never fired on him." I would ask Ms. Black to provide one example of where a police officer facing a young man with a gun ran a financial report prior to making the decision to defend his life to determine if the person was wealthy or not. Her statement is unsupportable.
One of the goals of the police is to remove guns from the streets. Allowing someone to openly carry what appears to the reasonable person to be a deadly weapon defeats this goal. Society and the police are not always at fault. At some point, personal responsibility comes into play. Carrying an exact replica of a gun used daily in street crimes in an area where gun violence frequently occurs is an irresponsible act with known consequences.
D. Jankowski, Bel Air