40 years later, a reminder cops can be cool
It was 8 p.m. or so on a weeknight. Nothing going on. So my friends and I decided it would be cool to pull into the parking lot of an elementary school, loiter, and see how long it would take for the cops to arrive. Yes, in retrospect, it was an obnoxious thing to do. Did I mention we were in our teens at the time?
Sure enough, it didn't take long for a squad car to arrive. The officer walked up to our little foursome, slouched or reclining on the car.
"OK, you guys," he said, "Where's the beer?"
An unexpected question. We answered truthfully: We don't have any. (Hey, we were obnoxious, not criminally stupid.)
"Well, if you guys are gonna lie to me," the Naperville cop said, "I'm going somewhere else."
A few more minutes of such banter, and then the officer got serious: You guys know you can't hang out here, people in the neighborhood freak out, etc. At that point, we had bonded so well, we'd have jumped off a cliff for the man. Don't recall for sure, but I think we went to someone's house to loiter.
I hadn't thought of that cop encounter in years until I saw the Ken Ericson video.As more than 16 million of you know (as of Friday), he's the Elgin police sergeant who breaks up a large crowd of young people loitering (and possibly contemplating racing their "tuner cars") in the parking lot of a Taco Bell on Summit Street. Sitting on the trunk lid of his squad car, a relaxed Ericson handles the situation with a gloved hand rather than an iron fist.
No where's-the-beer jokes, but Ericson waves with a grin at the young guy in the crowd - Jose Espinosa of Geneva - who started video recording. Ericson says the kids can't loiter, but he doesn't want to start writing tickets, either. Instead he talks about mutual respect. "We need to keep it safe in Elgin. Cool in Elgin," he tells the crowd, probably numbering more than two dozen.
The other thing that's cool is the reaction from the group. They're polite, respectful.
No huge secret to evoking that type of reaction, Ericson told Elena Ferrarin, our reporter who covers Elgin. He simply talked to the youths as he'd want to be talked to.
You look at policing "from a parent perspective," he said. "New officers think that if you see a problem, you have to write tickets and make arrests - but you don't always want to do that. You want to work with people."
No huge secret that the Ericson video went viral. Yes, it's nuts-and-bolts police work; a cop simply doing his job. But we all know what kinds of cop videos have been making the rounds as of late. I don't want to excuse some of the behavior that's been seen in those videos, and while this might be a bit naive, I also think the majority of the nation is law-abiding and wants to think of the police as being in their corner.
So, did that brief police encounter more than 40 years ago change anyone's behavior? No, we soon went back to doing dumb, teenager things. But I haven't forgotten the cop who dispersed us treating us like the adults we weren't. And probably no epiphanies among the crowd Ken Ericson broke up at the Taco Bell, either. But if just one of them walked away with a postitive feeling about police and how to conduct him or herself, well, that's just pretty cool. Cool in Elgin.
jdavis@dailyherald.com