Folks, let me tell you what happened up in New York City this week, because the details are still coming out and the shouting has already started. A man was shot during what authorities are calling an apparent ICE operation in the city, and now everybody from the governor on down wants answers. You can read the original report right here.

Now, I want to be careful with this one, and I'll tell you why. When somebody gets shot during a law enforcement operation, the first hours and days are full of bad information. Was the man armed? Was he the target? Was he a bystander? Was it an agent's weapon or somebody else's? The reporting so far doesn't answer all of that, and I'm not going to pretend it does. I taught fourth grade for 34 years, and if a child came to me with half a story, I didn't hand down a verdict until I had the whole thing. Grown-ups deserve the same standard, even the ones in the news.

What we know is this. There was an operation. There was a shooting. A man was hurt. Governor Hochul says she wants an explanation, and frankly, she's entitled to one. So is the public. Anytime a weapon goes off on an American street, we the people get a full accounting. That's not a partisan thing, it's a rule-of-law thing, and I've said the pledge enough mornings in my life to know the difference.

What I won't do, and what I'd ask you not to do either, is let the usual characters turn this into a cartoon before the facts land. You know the routine. Within an hour of any enforcement action gone sideways, certain folks are on television with their hair on fire, and certain other folks are pretending nothing happened at all. Both of those do a disservice to the man who got shot, to the officers involved, and to every single one of us trying to figure out what actually occurred on that street.

I've written before about the fine men and women who do this work. Enforcement officers go into situations every day that would make most of us hide behind a sofa, and they do it so the rest of us don't have to think about it. When one of those operations ends with gunfire, it deserves a serious investigation, and I mean serious. Not a press release. Not a hashtag. A real, by-the-book look at what happened, why it happened, and whether anything should be done differently next time. If an officer did everything right, then say so loudly and clear his name. If mistakes were made, then own them and fix them. That's how my daddy ran his hardware store and it's how a country ought to run too.

Dale will probably have the operational details when they come out, because that man can pull numbers out of a filing cabinet faster than I can pull a peach cobbler out of the oven. My job is simpler. My job is to tell you that a man was shot on a street in New York, that his family is worried sick tonight, and that the rest of us owe it to everybody involved to wait for the facts before we start hollering.

Patience isn't weakness, folks. Patience is what grown people do while the truth catches up to the headlines. I'll keep an eye on this one, and when we know more, you'll know more.

Talk soon. And say a prayer for this city. It needs all it can get.