Harrisburg police commissioner has spent a career trying to defuse tensions. The current crisis is his biggest test yet

“There’s a right way and a wrong way to treat people," Carter said.

• Charles Thompson/PennLive
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  Thompson has covered state government for The Patriot since 1999. Prior to that, he had covered various Cumberland County municipalities and school districts. Thompson lives in Carlisle with his wife, Beth, and their two children.

It was once more into the fire Monday night for Thomas Carter, commissioner of the Harrisburg City Police.

The commissioner, who has earned a reputation for finding a way to help cooler heads prevail, faced a losing battle this time. As soon as he took to the microphone at a Black Lives Matter demonstration at the state Capitol, Carter was put on full blast by a group of about eight people angered by what they felt was an aggressive over-reaction by police at Saturday’s protest marches in the city over the May 25 death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis.

Carter, who on Sunday received lavish praise from Mayor Eric Papenfuse and others for helping to calm the waters after a short clash between police and protesters Saturday, and preventing the kinds of vandalism, arson and looting seen in other cities, was making little headway here.

But show up he did.

And it’s that constant showing up, breathing the same air and walking the same streets of the people of his city, Carter’s supporters say, that stands a chance to help Harrisburg as the nation puts policing and the criminal justice system in America under the microscope once again after the death of another unarmed black man in police custody.

Floyd was suspected of passing a counterfeit bill at a Minneapolis convenience store. He died in police custody after an officer was captured on video kneeling on his neck for several minutes. That officer has been charged.

It’s not that every Harrisburg police officer is going to get it right every time. They don’t. But there is a feeling that the man at the top has real empathy for the people in the community he serves – whether it’s the family of the victims of a violent crime, or family members of the accused, who might be headed for a different kind of loss.

Carter, remember, on multiple occasions has been the father figure called out to lend an ear to people accused of homicides and other violent crimes, serving as the closer who – with literally nothing to offer other than a degree of safe passage – helped them agree to turn themselves in.

“He’s a chief with a heart, and that means he has a heart for the people,” said the Rev. Franklin Hairston-Allen, president of the Greater Harrisburg Branch of the NAACP. “He’s an insider, and that’s what people understand. He knows us.”

Some, however, question whether empathy and familiarity is enough in 2020.

Among marchers and onlookers at Monday’s rally, which did go off peacefully, it was easy to find critics who, even if they personally liked Carter, said they don’t see him as much more than a pawn of a system that routinely eats the poor and people of color for lunch, wrecking too many lives in the process.

“You’re all right if Carter’s around. But his posse? Especially the third shift? Some things are out of his hands,” said an Uptown resident who identified himself only as Darryl D., an African-American onlooker who was making clear that he feels for all the connectedness that Carter gets credit for showing, it doesn’t always filter down to the officers on the street.

Or up to the mayor’s office, he added.

“The mayor. What is he doing? He’s worried about the bookstore and Restaurant Row. Carter’s been putting in more footwork than our actual city government has. I will give that to him. You don’t see the mayor coming out here and stand in between shielded cops and a crowd of angry people.”

“It’s horrible. Every time there’s an injustice in the city, they send him out, he speaks, and then he wants everybody to accept an apology” agreed Michael Roberts, a 26-year-old city resident participating in the protest. “Like the city should be lucky that it’s not burning up right now, because Saturday was uncalled for, unacceptable and very inhumane…. There has been no change since I’ve been a kid.”

Carter was named Harrisburg’s police commissioner by Mayor Linda Thompson on an interim basis in 2013. It was after Thompson had lost that year’s Democratic Party primary to Papenfuse, so it was only an interim appointment, she said, in an acknowledgment that the new mayor was going to select his own team.

As it happened, Carter is one of the only Thompson appointees that stuck with the new administration.

“The choice has always been clear,” Papenfuse said during his January 2014 inauguration ceremony when he made Carter’s appointment permanent. “There is no one in Harrisburg who has more respect; who has more of a connection to the public than Tom Carter. We are lucky to have him as our chief.”

Clip speaks for itself. pic.twitter.com/EhLLsPIY6z

— Becky Metrick (@BeckyMetrick) June 1, 2020

Carter, 65, was pulled to policing from an early age.

Growing up in Uptown Harrisburg, his family lived next door for a time to Alexander Whitlock, who in 1988 would become the city’s first African-American police chief.

Another officer, Det. Tom Kohr, would engage Carter and his friends while on patrol in the neighborhood. “We would be out there playing sports, and he would, you know, stop and give us the time of day,” Carter said in a 2015 interview with The Burg. “And to me, I thought that was the neatest thing: ‘Wow, a police officer is taking time out to talk to us.’ And I became curious. Under what rules do these guys work? What’s governing them?”

But, he also recognized in the 1960s, ’70, and ’80s, Carter said, that policing wasn’t perfect then either.

His father encouraged him to explore his interest in law enforcement, Carter recalled Monday, telling him “that if you want to change something, you have to become part of that thing that you want changed…. You have to get involved and understand what it is, and you can’t do it from the outside looking in. You’ve got to do it from the inside looking out.”

So after short stints in hospital security at Harrisburg Hospital and with the Dauphin County sheriff’s Department, Carter took the jump, joining the Harrisburg Police Department in 1988.

As a detective with the city, Carter found that his roots in the community helped him solve cases. “A lot of people, they knew me,” he said. “I had made a lot of friends.” He routinely gave out his phone number, because people who didn’t want to be seen talking to an officer often would be willing to give information over the phone.

Treating people with respect and forthrightness, he discovered, could lead to surprising results, even from criminals. “I had people wanted for violent felony crimes come to my house and surrender to me because they trust me,” Carter said The Burg profile. “They knew I wasn’t going to lie to them, I was going to treat them right. And the respect was there.”

He elaborated on that Monday, before the rally on the Capitol steps.

“There are certain laws that hold citizens accountable if they commit crime but it doesn’t mean, you know, that they’re bad people. It’s an unfortunate situation in their life that they’re going through. But you can still arrest somebody by calling them ‘yes sir’ and ‘yes ma’am’ and offer them that respect.

“There’s a right way and a wrong way to treat people. And I believe in treating people the right way unless they change that.”

That’s the change that Carter has tried to make. And it has been celebrated along the way.

Since he took the helm in 2014, Carter has won numerous local and regional accolades for his leadership, including honors from the NAACP and Dauphin County Crime Stoppers. He’s also won the “Peacemaker in Our Midst” award from the World Affairs Council of Harrisburg, and the Harrisburg Hero Award.

Now, a new generation sees him as part of the machinery that needs to be overhauled.

It’s a strange position for the chief.

Citing a picture that showed the chief in between a phalanx of police in riot gear and protesters Saturday, the man who called himself Darryl D. said it described the chief’s current predicament.

“Carter, he’s on both sides of the fence. He’s stuck in the middle, you know? And that’s a hard role to play. He’s going to honor his oath. But he doesn’t want to lose the people. He’s definitely a force for our city. But like I said: One man. He’s just one man.”

But to the chief, who took a knee in apology for George Floyd’s death and all mistreatment of blacks at the hands of police officers on Monday but still didn’t win his most ardent critics over, there is still room for hope. Carter, who has seen the aftermath of the Rodney King beatings in Los Angeles and the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, says he understands the anger.

“I do understand. I would like to say to all of the young people out there, I feel your pain because we have a history of being treated differently,” Carter said Sunday, during a debriefing on Saturday’s events. “Me, speaking as a black man in this country I had the same fears that you have right now.”

And he understood it again, Monday night.

“This is the obligation that I took on. We (police) are looked at as the face of the criminal justice system. We enforce the laws that the legislators make. We’re on the front lines and so quite naturally the citizens would have a problem with police when an incident happens like this,” Carter said. “But I understand. I hold no animosity toward anybody or anyone regardless of how they talk to me, regardless of what they say. I still have nothing but compassion and hope for them.”

And, Carter said, he still carries hope for a better tomorrow.

“The law has to apply equally for everybody, and that’s a work in progress.”

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