As a journalist, Tux Turkel apparently has a profound acuity to obtain facts and information regarding police shootings of people with mental illness.

I admire his skill and determination in gathering these facts and statistics. I have never seen this amount of newspaper space dedicated to one story. I would only hope that his skills will be used to see the other side of the coin.

He should research and report about the law enforcement officers and innocent people who have been killed by the mentally ill. I hope the newspaper will dedicate as much space for this story.

People are mentally ill through no fault of their own. Police and innocent people certainly do not die at the hands of mentally ill through any fault of their own.

When police respond to an incident, and they are staring at the barrel of a gun pointed at them or a bystander, they do not think about mental illness or emotional stress but preservation of their life and the lives of others. It takes a nanosecond between a trigger pull and the bullet reaching its target. The officer has less than that to respond.

Unless a person has had to make that less-than-a-second decision to protect his life or that of another, they should leave the Monday morning quarterbacking to the sporting public.

The newspaper should compile its statistics, then report on the mentally ill killed by police and the police and innocents killed by mentally ill. I look forward to that story.

Daniel Murray

Belgrade