Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly no doubt spoke for all New Yorkers in their praise yesterday for Officer Richard Burt. He is the policeman who felled Council Member James Davis’ assassin moments after the killer shot the elected official repeatedly in the chest. “I don’t consider myself a hero. I just did my job,” Mr. Burt, father of three, said yesterday. “Everybody that was in City Hall at the time yesterday will for the rest of their lives be grateful to Officer Burt,” the mayor said. “It was chaos in the council chambers and there was one person who kept his head and did his job,” Speaker Gifford Miller added. “Thankfully, we will never know what would have happened had Officer Burt not been there, been so quick on his feet, and so accurate with his gun,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Reflecting on those comments, which were given upon Officer Burt’s promotion to detective, we found ourselves thinking of another New Yorker who was recently quick on his feet and so accurate with a gun. He is Ronald Dixon, a Navy veteran who, in December, was at his home in Canarsie with his girlfriend, daughter, and toddler son when he saw an intruder enter his son’s bedroom. According to an account in the Daily News, Mr. Dixon confronted the intruder, who ran toward him and yelled, “Come upstairs!” Mr. Dixon shot the burglar, Ivan Thompson, twice in the confrontation, according to the paper. The intruder made it to Mr. Dixon’s driveway before collapsing when the police came.

Instead of being given a medal, Mr. Dixon was charged with misdemeanor gun possession; he had purchased his 9mm. pistol legally in Florida, but had not yet registered it in New York City. The district attorney offered Mr. Dixon a plea bargain requiring but four weekends at the slammer at Rikers Island. Mr. Dixon, however, refused to do any time, saying that if he couldn’t work on the weekends he wouldn’t be able to make his mortgage payments. It was only late last month that Mr. Dixon’s legal battle came to an end when he accepted a three-day jail sentence of which, because of a technicality, he didn’t have to serve one minute. The district attorney, Charles Hynes, defended his prosecution of Mr. Dixon on the grounds that there were 486 shooting in Brooklyn in 2002. It would have been more logical to offer him a job in the NYPD and to honor him for the lives he, like Detective Burt, may well have saved.