Where I grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn, one of the most violent neighborhoods in New York, there was an alley alongside the building where my family lived. The alley was a semi-public place: I played in that alley; guys and girls snuck moments to feel each other up in that alley; and drug users got high in that alley. My mother’s second-floor bedroom window overlooked that alley, and one night while we were watching television, there was an argument over a crap game and someone was shot and killed there.

When I was about 10 years old, a friend and I entered that alley at the same time an officer walked in at the other end. His gun was drawn, and, instinctively, we both turned and ran. The explosion from that gunfire is a sound I’ll never forget. We got out of that alley safely, but since that day I’ve had a bit of fear of police officers.

Fear of officers is clearly a black thing. I’m reminded of this after watching the video seen around the world of a much-talked-about snowball fight on 14th and U streets during the area’s first storm. From the video, you see a mass of people throwing snowballs both at each other and at passing cars.

When snowballs hit a passing Hummer, a man gets out and confronts the racially mixed—but predominately white—crowd, while clearly holding a gun in his left hand. Later, as he speaks into a radio, it’s clear that he is a police officer.

He wasn’t the only cop on the scene to draw a gun. A uniformed cop responding to a report of a man with a gun steps out of his marked car with gun in hand as well.

The officer overreacted, and he should be reprimanded. But he wasn’t the biggest idiot on the scene. The biggest idiot was the guy who, snowball in hand, reared back and took aim at an armed officer. With Mariano Rivera-like accuracy, he fired a snowball and connected with the officer’s face.

Did I mention that the officer, already pissed off, was holding a gun?

In throwing a snowball at an armed, angry man, that man callously put his life—and the lives of everyone else around him—in jeopardy. It’s doubtful that he knew, as he threw the snowball, that the guy was a cop. What if he hadn’t been a cop, but a passing thug who didn’t take too kindly to being disrespected? A thug might have been inclined to light up the clown who threw the snowball at his face, and everyone else around him.

In an era where everyone has a camera, the video of the incident has gone viral. The reaction of the officer has outraged many people. As I read several comments at the end of some of the stories and videos relating to the incident, some of that outrage is misguided.

The officer involved is black, and quite a few commentators thought race had something to do with the incident. One of the comments described it as a typical reaction to an overzealous black cop.

Another called the cop “racist, picking on those white kids. If those kids were black he would have let it go.”

My favorite reaction was from someone who wrote that had the incident “been reversed, i.e. a white off-duty cop and a predominately black crowd of snow ball throwers, I’m sure Al Sharpton would be in D.C. right now blowing things out of proportion and making it a racial incident.”

Let’s reverse the incident. Let’s say there were several hundred black people at an intersection throwing snowballs, or anything else. Someone would have called the police and reported a riot. A report of a riot would have led to the response of riot cops. And the response of riot cops would have meant a forceful response to control the incident.

It would not have been a pretty sight. And, yes, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would have been in D.C.