Still, these days in this city - 336 homicides, mostly black men killed and doing the killing, and now a 25-year veteran police officer assassinated by another black man in a hoodie - it saddens me to know that if I were to encounter a young black man on the street in a hoodie, I would fear him.
I know I'm not the only one. If I were, 54 schools wouldn't have been on lockdown during the manhunt in Philadelphia Wednesday. SWAT units wouldn't be swarming. Stop-and-frisk wouldn't be in full effect in West Oak Lane and all points north and south.
Urban terrorism runs rampant.
Many killers are just kids who should be slinging backpacks in school, not packing heat in doughnut shops.
They are kids who look like my 20-year-old son.
Yesterday, Officer Chuck Cassidy died, snuffed out at the hands of a gunman trying to get money - a 6-foot-tall stocky black man with a distinguishable tattoo on his left hand.
From all reports, Cassidy, only 54, was a good cop and loving family man who took pains to check on a West Oak Lane Dunkin' Donuts because it had been robbed before. People cried over him. That's how much they liked him.
Now he is dead, and his wife, son and two daughters are left to plan his funeral. Officer Cassidy's death makes three cops shot this week, five this year. If it's open season on the people who are supposed to protect us, how safe are we?
Not very. I don't want to hear this nonsense about the police being the enemy in the 'hood. Let's be real: It's not the police who are senselessly gunning down black victims. It's mostly black perpetrators.
"I'm not afraid of black men, I'm afraid for black men," Lisa Jones, 40, told me yesterday as we stood talking in front of a food store on Ogontz Avenue in West Oak Lane. "I have three sons, and I get very nervous for them. For the good youth. They could be victims of the perpetrators or the police."
