On Tuesday, Columbus interim police chief Fred Shelton spoke at the Columbus Rotary Club at Lion Hills Center. Although he has made numerous public appearances in the roughly three months he has served as interim chief, this was just the second time I had heard him speak.
The first occasion was on Nov. 2, shortly after Shelton became interim chief, when his was the calming voice in an emotionally-charged meeting at Hunt School two weeks after the officer-involved shooting death of Ricky Ball.
What struck me as unique Tuesday was not Shelton’s message — it has remained pretty consistent all along — but the pronounced difference between the tone and nature of the questions asked of him by the two audiences.
In the November meeting, largely an audience of black residents, there were questions were about police profiling, the use of excessive force and a perceived lack of respect displayed by some officers towards residents.
Nobody asked those questions Tuesday.
Instead, Tuesday’s audience asked questions about “The Ferguson Effect,” a theory that suggests a causal link between protests of the use of excessive force by police and increases in crime rates in a number of major cities, due to police forces being subject to heightened levels of scrutiny. There were also questions about whether the CPD has an adequate number of officers to do its job. There was a question about rumors of low morale among the CPD officers because of the negative publicity from the Ball case.
Nobody asked those questions on Nov. 2.
Later, one Rotarian asked me, “Why would anyone run from the police?”
I sort of shrugged off the question because I wasn’t quite expecting it.
Now that I’ve given it a bit of thought, here is how I would respond to that question:
I don’t know why people run from the police.
I just know why I did.
That happened more than 40 years ago when I was a young teen in the era of “free-range children.” Kids had the run of the neighborhood and beyond, generally as far as our legs or bicycles would carry us. This liberty was not without constraints. There were rules in place, among them I was not to ride in a car driven by anther teen.
One Sunday afternoon, as I was walking along the shoulder of Old Saltillo Road, a beat-up old Ford slowed down and stopped. It was driven by an older teen, who invited me to hop in the car with him and his buddies. That a 17-year-old would want me, a 14-year-old, to hang out with him was an honor. I happily pilled into the back seat, rules be damned.
We weren’t doing anything illegal — smoking cigarettes and cruising slowly past the houses of the cute girls in town — but a sense of guilt nagged at me. About an hour into this adventure, one of the four bald tires on the old Ford popped. The driver lost control and we went careening into a ditch. No one was hurt, but as we were standing around assessing the damage, the blue lights of a police car emerged on the horizon.
I didn’t know what the cops would do when they arrived, but I figured it would be far better find that out second-hand. I hit the ground running and didn’t stop until I got home.
Why do people run from the police? Maybe, like me, they are gripped by irrational fear.
Maybe they have committed some offense and want to escape, which is a reasonable response, too, self-preservation being a basic human instinct. You might be surprised how quickly you abandon principle when the situation is no longer hypothetical.
And maybe, that fear and flight is provoked. A black friend of mine, a college-educated, middle-aged professional, said there is something unnerving about being stopped for speeding and watching as an officer approaches, his hand on his gun flap. It has happened to him more than once he said, and for a minute or so, fleeing is an option you keep on the table, crazy as it seems.
These two meetings provided an interesting contrast in perceptions. Tuesday, the prevailing view seemed to be “Don’t be a criminal and you’ll have nothing to fear.” In November, the view was “Don’t assume we are criminals and we’ll have nothing to fear.”
So, then, who is right?
It largely depends on your experience, doesn’t it?
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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