but thought better of it, because I was/am torn.

On the one hand, the police were doing their job .................

It was described as a burglary without a weapon involved. Stopping and questioning so long as he reasonably fits the description is ok. Putting him on the ground at gunpoint without evidence of a weapon is over the top.

that was my "however, on the other hand"...........

. . . as he wrote in his column:

Now, don’t get me wrong: If indeed my son matched the description of a suspect, I would have had no problem with him being questioned appropriately. School is his community, his home away from home, and he would have appreciated reasonable efforts to keep it safe. The stop is not the problem; the method of the stop is the problem.

Why was a gun drawn first? Why was he not immediately told why he was being detained? Why not ask for ID first?

What if my son had panicked under the stress, having never had a gun pointed at him before, and made what the officer considered a “suspicious” movement? Had I come close to losing him? Triggers cannot be unpulled. Bullets cannot be called back.

The question is, if the suspect in the burglary had been described as white, would the police officer have pulled a gun on the first white kid he encountered? Somehow, on the campus of Yale, I seriously doubt it.

Some folks commenting on Blow's article have defended police based on a 'what-if' scenario (i.e., what if it had been the suspect whom the officer stopped, and what if he had been armed, and what if the officer didn't draw his gun first and had gotten shot first). The problem with that rationale is that in theory it could be used to justify any police officer drawing a gun on any citizen under any circumstance, on the theory that such citizen might be armed and dangerous.

class without power to object is treated in such a fashion (sarcasm). I am sure such thefts have occurred in the past on campus. I wonder how many other times a weapon was drawn? Drawing a weapon should always trigger a report and a review. We review every "close call" in our manufacturing facilities. The very act of drawing a weapon places the "suspect" and bystanders at risk. It should be reviewed in the same fashion.

. . . if a gun were drawn on the young scion of a well-heeled white family with a long line of Yale alumni-benefactors, merely because he matched a description. I think it is fair to say that heads would roll!

Yale police never used to behave that way in my day (mid-'80s)! In fact, they were known to tip students off about upcoming drug raids by the New Haven PD.