Whoa, Bob!  The responsibility to heal Englewood's tortured racial past and present should not rest squarely on the shoulders of Englewood Police Chief David Bowman.  The residents of Englewood need to first stop hiding behind their curtains and acknowledge that there is a widening racial chasm that must be dealt with.
 
In order to appease, some City powerbrokers suggest that Bowman should bite the proverbial bullet and relinquish his position to a man who was made Acting Police Chief by an Interim City Manager prior to the point that the legal system had even received a chance to work.  I don't think so!  There are a number of facts that have been seemingly ignored or minimized in the decision of whether Chief Bowman should be reinstated or not.  I would like to highlight them here:

1) Suspended Chief Bowman was acquitted of charges that he falsified documents to get an inmate out of jail for the day to attend his father's funeral as were his co-defendants, Judge Joseph Clark and Police Sgt. Emma Jackson.

2)  A central leg of the prosecution's case was that the trio concocted a false warrant to help the inmate.  According to the prosecution, the warrant was illegal because it was based on the claim that the prisoner had paid a previous fine.  As reported in the November 16th edition of The Record, State Superior Court Judge William C. Meehan concluded that the inmate did, in fact, still owe the City of Englewood the outstanding fine at the root of the warrant used in his March 2003 release.

3) There have been well reasoned concerns presented by many, questioning whether David Bowman was ever qualified to assume the role of Police Chief.  After all, aside from being a lifelong resident of Englewood and tightly aligned with City powers-that-be, what else is there that rises to the level of substantive?  It is apparent that the City of Englewood paid a great deal of money to settle cases filed against Bowman acting in his capacity as Chief of Police.  Yet, the time to correct those wrongs, if any, was at the time during which they occurred rather than in the opportunistic way in which the matter is being handled now.

4) A little noted point that should be factored into this debate is the deep and Byzantine relationship that lies under the surface involving Blacks and law enforcement.  The fact that the jury deliberated for approximately two hours and returned with a "not guilty" verdict appears like the jury reached a not too common "common sense" resolution to this observer.  The jury seemed to resoundingly say, there was nothing wrong with what the trio did.  They allowed a Black man to maintain his dignity by attending his father's funeral and repast sans shackles (reminiscent of slavery) and returned him to jail at the end of the day where he immediately resumed his sentence.

On another level and when divorced from the players, an incredibly interesting paradigmatic conflict is playing itself out here.  Bowman and his co-defendants relied upon an ethic of care in making a judgment that was understood and valued in-community.  Yet, the same decision was reviled in the broader community that privileges an ethic of justice and seems bent on wishing away the very serious racial problems that have resurfaced here in Englewood.

Rather than using the metaphor of the racial litmus test to describe aspects of the Bowman debacle, I choose instead to use the metaphor of the "canary in the mine" conceptualized by Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres.  The Bowman case exemplifies the canary in the following respect: "their [canaries'] distress is the first sign of danger that threatens us all.  It is easy enough to think that when we sacrifice this canary, the only harm is to communities of color.  Yet others ignore problems that converge around racial minorities at their own peril, for these problems are symptoms warning us that we are all at risk."