If the Police Commissioner wasn’t black, he would have been called a racist hundreds of times by now.
Update to this story.
Via Baltimore Sun:
Officer Andrew Groman stood outside the car and ordered passenger Donte Jones to show his hands, police say, but the 19-year-old passenger wouldn’t.
Groman warned Jones he would be hit with a Taser. Finally, police say, the officer fired the shock gun at him.
At the same time, police say, Jones withdrew a black revolver and squeezed off three rounds. A bullet slipped under Groman’s bulletproof vest, police say, wounding him in the abdomen. […]
Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts did not appear at the news conference. Batts drew criticism from activists after he wondered aloud Sunday whether the demonstrators who have protested the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Eric Garner in New York and others at the hands of police in recent months would show similar concern for Groman.
“Although I certainly understand the pain and frustration expressed by Commissioner Batts, I believe his questioning of the community’s response to the shooting is misplaced and not helpful to the dialogue between the police and the community we’re trying to build,” Tessa Hill-Aston, president of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP, said Monday. […]
“Baltimore Bloc condemns the insensitive and deliberately provocative comments made by Anthony Batts last night,” the group said on its Facebook page. “Police officers are sworn to protect and serve the community. They are aware this is a dangerous job, as is the community who pays them for this service, arms them with several weapons at a time, and provides them with bulletproof vests and other protective gear that in some cases we are not legally permitted to own ourselves.
“This is quite different from the circumstances surrounding the in-custody murders of unarmed civilians by those same extremely armed and protected agents of the state.”