The online lynching of Dawnta Harris

The involvement of four black teenagers in the death of a white female police officer in Baltimore County has triggered the kind of response that sets off alarm bells for anyone who knows history — as it should for all of us.

As might be expected in a world in which fact and fiction and everything in between instantly bombard us from the internet, 24-hour news cycles and a proliferation of punditry, we are hearing a lot about the incident. But we know very little about what happened when 29-year-old Officer Amy Caprio met 16-year-old Dawnta Harris in the Perry Hall community just before 2 p.m. on May 21.

What we know is that Caprio, a much-admired officer, responded to a call about a suspicious vehicle and that she died after being struck by a Jeep Wrangler driven by Dawnta, a troubled teenager whose mother had turned to the juvenile justice system for help. The police have said that Dawnta had been acting in cahoots with three other teenagers who were burglarizing homes in a part of the county where black faces stand out.

Dawnta and the others have been charged with first-degree murder and are being held in jail in Towson. One of the teen’s lawyers, J. Wyndal Gordon, called what happened an accident.

While in an ideal world race and gender would be irrelevant to any reaction to a bunch of teenagers behaving irresponsibly and triggering a tragedy, ours is far from that nirvana. And so you see in social media posts and hear in radio blather that black “animals” and “thugs” should die. There’s little of the reserve and concern expressed when white teenagers go on shooting sprees in the nation’s schools.

“I was hoping they’d kill him during the apprehension,” one poster wrote on the Baltimore County Police and Fire page on Facebook.