By Jerry Riley

This comes about after hearing a lot of comments from people who didn’t seem to understand the police response to an eleven year old carrying an air rifle across the Eureka College campus. Comments ranged from “When I was a kid we all carried our BB guns” to “I’ll bet they even alerted the S.W.A.T. in Peoria.”
I had to remind people that the original call was probably not that a young boy was walking across the campus carrying a BB gun. My guess it was something like “There is a man carrying what looks like a rifle.” Man or boy, “rifle” is the key word here. Even a small boy can pull a trigger, and, what a revoltin’ development this is!
What we read in the paper was the result, with all the information. All the officers knew when they responded was that there was a report of a man with a gun in the area; anyone of them thinking they could come under fire.
The Sheriff did try to downplay the report as an mistake, and he was correct. The report might have been a mistake, but the reaction was based on what was reported. I would think it would be better to report suspicious activity, and be mistaken, than to not report suspicious activity and be sorry. I think the response should ease people’s minds, knowing that our police, local, county and state have plans and are prepared in case of this type of incident.

Jerry Riley is an occasional commentator for the News Bulletin. He is a retired telecommunications supervisor.                    

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