Don't Weep For Him, Bloomberg

Two different gun deaths - one bad in Bloomberg's estimation, one that can and should be ignored.

First the one that makes Bloomberg sad:

Alphonza Bryant III could not, in the end, escape his father’s fate. At the age of 17, his life was extinguished by a hail of bullets on April 22 as he hung out with friends on a street corner in the South Bronx, just four blocks from where his father was murdered. Police officials believe that Mr. Bryant was a victim of mistaken identity in an act of retaliation by gang members.

“It wasn’t even curfew time,” his mother, Jenaii van Doten, said in an interview Wednesday at a laundry near their home. “You would think that all the violence happens after midnight, but they fooled me this time.” 

Mr. Bryant’s life and death came into the public spotlight on Tuesday when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg singled him out as a casualty of gun violence, using the teenager to illustrate the toll that illegal guns can have on New York, and the value of the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics. Mr. Bloomberg criticized civil rights groups, saying they expressed no outrage about Mr. Bryant’s shooting, and suggested that The New York Times had failed to cover the killing because the teenager was black.

Now the one Bloomberg ignored:

NEW YORK -- A week after police shot to death an unarmed 18-year-old in his grandmother's Bronx apartment, questions continue to swirl around the aggressive police tactics that led to the fatal confrontation.

Ramarley Graham died last Thursday after Richard Haste, 30, a New York police officer, entered his grandmother's apartment and shot Graham in the chest while he attempted to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet. Graham was unarmed and police did not have a warrant to enter the home.

Graham's death has sparked street protests in Wakefield, a low-income neighborhood with a large African-American and Caribbean immigrant population. "They had no business kicking down the door. They went too far," said Tyrone Harris, 27. "They need to go to jail just like any other citizen."

Jeffrey Emdin, an attorney representing Graham's mother, called the police tactics unlawful. "They illegally entered the home," Emdin said. "They had no right to be inside. They had no right to use force."

Protesters linked the shooting to the NYPD's aggressive street policing program, called "stop-and-frisk," which predominantly targets low-income minority neighborhoods. In 2011, the program stopped and searched more than 500,000 New Yorkers, 85 percent of them black or Latino. The searches contributed to a record number of misdemeanor marijuana arrests last year.

"The public has every reason to question whether this shooting was the product of the NYPD marijuana arrest crusade, or whether it's the product of their hyper-aggressive stop-and-frisk program," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. 

Gee, where is Bloomberg's press conference to state publicly how stop-and-frisk saved Ramarley Graham's life?

Oh, right - the program actually caused his death.

And where is the mayor's hand-wringing over the senseless gun violence that killed Graham?

Oh right - his "own army" killed Garaham, so everything's cool.

What happened to Alphonza Bryant III is awful, but so is what happened to Ramarley Graham.

How come nobody in the news media points this out?

How come nobody in the news media points out the disconnect between the mayor's reaction in the tragic Bryant case to the mayor's reaction in the tragic Graham case?