What the good ones are willing to do

It's different now. Back in the day, whenever I saw a state trooper stepping toward a car he'd just ordered to the side of the highway at night, his angular image washed in passing headlights, I would feel smug-lucky that someone else had been caught speeding.

Or, if the occupants of the vehicle were black, I might have wondered whether the trooper had engaged in racial profiling in ordering the stop.

In either case, I'd press the pedal and keep moving, like everyone else on the road.

Today, when I drive by such a scene — trooper approaching a stranger in a car on the side of the road — I just hope the trooper survives the traffic stop.

It's different now.

Twenty years ago, I yelled at a man who clearly was abusing a boy no more than 3 years old. The man had hoisted the child by the hood of his little winter coat. The child appeared to be trussed inside the coat and, to my eye, he seemed to be choking as his father carried him a good distance across a shopping center parking lot in Hereford. I yelled. The father yelled back. He was angry. Before he drove away, I got his tag number and reported the incident to police.

When I told that story to friends, more than one said I had been foolish to open my mouth because there was no way I could have known if the frustrated dad had been carrying a gun or had one under the driver's seat of his SUV.

I was surprised at that reaction. I guess the concept of using a gun to express what the middle finger used to express so effectively was still relatively new to suburban life at the time — the trend had hit Baltimore years earlier — and so was the idea of the random shooting of strangers.

It's different now.

Wednesday's fatal shootings of Harford County deputies Patrick Dailey and Mark Logsdon were shocking. Two accomplished law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty on the same day, in the same incident. The shootings took place where shootings are rare — Logsdon and Dailey were the first Harford deputies to be killed by gunfire since the late 19th century — and in a comfortable and comforting chain bakery-cafe that has become part of suburban culture across the land.

And the attack on Dailey in the Panera Bread in Abingdon was so sudden — the deputy never drew his gun — that it almost seemed random. That might explain why the Harford County sheriff initially said that Dailey had been “targeted” by the gunman, David Brian Evans.

That story has since been disavowed. “We don't believe [Evans] laid in wait to ambush,” Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told reporters the next day.

But the 68-year-old Evans, killed by deputies after mortally wounding Logsdon, likely knew that there were outstanding warrants bearing his name, and that an approaching uniform meant trouble. He might have been suicidal. He had a semiautomatic handgun.

“It's our belief, because he knew there was a warrant out for his arrest and what the ultimate outcome of that encounter was going to be, his arrest, that is why he took the action,” Gahler said.

America has a long history of violence. When I say it's different now, I don't mean to suggest that people of my generation, baby boomers, grew up in some idyllic time. In fact, just the opposite is true if you look at general crime rates across the decades since 1963, the year of President Kennedy's assassination.

It was much worse by the late 1960s and 1970s, into the 1980s and early 1990s. The rate of crime has dropped significantly in the past two decades, though majorities of Americans still tell polling companies they believe it's rising.

News coverage of day-to-day crime certainly feeds that, and it's hard to live anywhere around Baltimore and believe that crime is down. But we also live in an age of random acts of gun violence — mass killings that erupt where least expected, often in suburban areas.

These incidents come and go, but each time affirm that this vast, complex country is full of anger, addiction and mental illness, people scarred for life by some miserable experience. All those pathological conditions exist just below the surface of the mainstream. And there are so many guns by now, it seems impossible to keep them from people who should not have them.

So it's different now. The fear of random violence is palpable. The police are there to reduce the chances of it reaching us.

As a society, we've always honored them, and we will again this week. Even in this time when police are under greater scrutiny and feeling underappreciated, even scorned by some, there's still broad respect what the good ones are willing to do — out there in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day, walking up to strangers.

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