Despite all the premature marching about the bachelor party police shooting (there’s still plenty of possibility the cops did nothing wrong there), I doubt this story will set off the wave of anti-police sentiment some hope/fear.

Why? The “victim,” judging by his name, was white.

Anatoly Dimitriev, 62, held his son hostage with an axe, then fled his home. New York officers chased him, and when he lunged at them, one shot him.

The AP rushes to put this in the context of the Bell shooting outside the strip club, making reference to the marches and quoting an officer urging calm.

First of all, this seems compeletely within police procedure. Cops can use one degree of force higher than that being used against them. If someone threatens them with a knife, club, etc., they can use firepower. The officer may have saved his own life, depending on just how close the man with the axe got.

As usual, we’ll have to wait for more facts to be sure whether this was justified.

Second, lest anyone think I’m just playing the race card, and that Al Sharpton and his ilk will be concerned about a white criminal shot, let’s look at some of the things NYC marchers said to Reuters today:

“This must stop. They have been killing us for too long,” said Michelle Bethea, a 51-year-old New York legal assistant. “The black people of America are treated like dirt. Our kids don’t live to see 21 because of the people that are supposed to protect us. It doesn’t make sense.”

And:

“The police have done this far too many times, they’re killing too many of our black men. Every time something goes wrong the first thing they do is to pull out their gun,” said Terry Hendrickson, 37, a student, from Morristown, New Jersey.

It was a “day of black outrage.”

These are race-baiters, and they see every incident involving a black person as an instance of racism. They won’t care or protest much for someone named Anatoly. The assumption is all the more amusing in the strip club shooting — the officer who fired the first shot was black.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com and http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.