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Detroit Cop's Son 'Hears' Late Dad's Wait-for-Facts Reaction to Ferguson

August 26, 2014, 1:54 PM by  Alan Stamm

Ron Fournier, a native Detroiter who became a prominent national journalist, has extra reasons to think about his father these days.

The old man knew more than a little about neighborhood policing and about unruly crowds -- topics making national news lately. 


Detroit Police Officer Ronald E. Fournier
August 30, 1939 -- March 16, 2014

Ronald Ernest Fournier was 74 when he died last March 16 at a nursing home on Mack Avenue in Grosse Pointe Woods -- "a few miles from the beat he walked as a rookie cop," says his obituary.

The elder Fournier was a Detroit police officer for 25 years and a lifelong east-sider. His 51-year-old son is editorial director and a columnist at National Journal and a former AP bureau chief in Washington, D.C.

In a reflective essay at his public policy magazine's site, Fournier shares regret about being unable to "talk to Dad about Ferguson . . . over a beer—or two."

I wish I could ask him what he thinks of Michael Brown and Darren Wilson; of the Ferguson protesters, the Ferguson Police Department, the Missouri State Highway Patrol and Capt. Ron Johnson; of Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, President Obama, and the orgy of outrage from the professional left and right. But I can't; Dad passed away this spring.

I suspect he'd be insulted by the rush to judgment against Wilson, the officer who shot an unarmed Brown. There are people—powerful people—demanding his arrest and conviction without full knowledge of the facts.

I suspect he'd question why the Ferguson Police Department responded to the initial protests like an invading army. Also, I don't think he'd want anybody besmirching an 18-year-old shooting victim for political gain. There were few things Dad hated worse than politics and bad police work.


Ron Fournier, journalist: "There were few things Dad hated worse than politics and bad police work."

The writer, a 1985 University of Detroit Mercy graduate who lives in Arlington, Va., also thinks about Detroit's tense days of July 23-27, 1967, when his father --  a month away from turning 28 -- was on the street in riot gear.  

The Detroit riots were the subject of one of the last conversations I had with Dad before he got sick. We were at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum with my son, standing in front of a 1960s exhibit that included a life-sized picture of the Detroit riots. "We fought in the bad neighborhoods," Dad said, "all the while wondering whether the bad guys were burning down our homes, too."

Our neighborhood and their neighborhood. Good guys and bad guys. Pinning a badge on your chest tends to make the world binary--even when you're a cop, like my father, whom other cops emulate for their ability to defuse tense situations with humor, empathy, and street smarts. Not their guns.

Here's where I think Dad and I would agree: We don't know enough to either condemn or exonerate Wilson. Not yet. I can almost hear Dad: Why do you think you've got all the answers? Who made you judge and jury?

Fournier's deeply personal thoughts, shared publicly, are timely for a reason beyond events in Missouri.

Later this week, I will be in my hometown to help scatter Dad's ashes in the Detroit River, within sight of his 1967 battleground.

I know Ron Fournier only through his work, but it seems clear that the six-foot, six-inch law enforcer who helped Florence Fournier raise three sons and a daughter on Coram Street would feel pride as shiny as his badge if he could talk about Ferguson over frosty mugs with his boy the journalist.


Read more:  National Journal


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