Mayor Dave Bing: When a gun shot replaces a jump shot!

commentary by Harold Bell

Poor training and poor planning leaves a 7 year old little girl dead. The Detroit Police Department is being blamed for the child’s untimely death.

A Detroit newspaper reported “It often seems that even the most heinous crime fails to move Detroit, a city almost numb to violence. But a series of shooting deaths in recent days have been particularly chilling.

The killings have struck across all age groups: a grandmother, a middle-aged cop, a 7-year-old child. This time, outrage is building, but what will it lead to? Is there anything more substantive the city can do to fight gun violence? Can the city afford to put more officers on the streets?”

The city’s reputation for crime needs a turning point – and its new Mayor is the point guard—Dave Bing.

The most recent case began last Friday, May 14, when a 17-year-old high school student standing in front of a store in one of Detroit’s bleakest neighborhoods was shot by a man twice his age for reasons that remain unclear. The boy, police said, stumbled across the street, collapsed and died. Then, shortly after midnight Sunday, Detroit police officers arrived at a two-story house not far away.

With a warrant in hand, they planned to search the house for the 34-year-old suspect. Officers say they announced their presence and then tossed a flash grenade into the front window of one side of the duplex to disorient the people inside. Then, police say, officers entered the house, where a 46-year-old grandmother in the front room allegedly struggled with an officer. Next, police say, an officer’s gun discharged, fatally shooting the woman’s 7-year-old granddaughter Aiyana Stanley Jones.

Two years ago Dave Bing came back to his original hometown of Washington, DC and officially announced to friends and family he was running for Mayor of his adopted hometown of Detroit.

The announcement came during a Spingarn high school class re-union in 2008. My question to him was, Why?

It looked like he was a man that had everything. He was a NBA Hall of Fame basketball player and voted as one of the 50 Greatest Players of all time. He had money earned as a successful businessman and three daughters to take over and run the family business. Why would he want the headaches that would come with trying revive a city on life support?

The city of Detroit was “Dead” the only thing left was for someone to start shoveling the dirt on top of it to bury it.

I admit I was at a disadvantaged. I was on the outside looking in, but still the question of Why stayed on my mind. It finally hit me that Dave had made Detroit his home for the past 43 years, what did I know and when did I know it?

I have known Dave since he was a little skinny kid playing basketball on the playgrounds of Watts and Kelly Miller playgrounds. He was from a hard working family in the NE section of DC. I watched him develop and grow as an athlete and a man.

His development as an athlete was ahead of his development as a man.

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