A Police Chief Turned Pastor, Working to Heal the Nation’s Racial Rifts



NORTH LAKE, Wis. — In the days leading up to Christmas, the aging pastor of a small Episcopal church set amid the glacial hills here began to write a parable. It came neither from Scripture nor from yuletide tradition, but rather from the priest’s very different earlier life. The Rev. David Couper, 77, recalled the predawn hours of a March day nearly a quarter-century ago. A fire had broken out at a housing project in Madison, Wis., where he was the chief of police. A police sergeant, hearing about the blaze from a 911 dispatcher, jauntily sang of the apartment complex, “Sommerset Circle is burning down.”

Five black children, the oldest 9 and the youngest 20 months, died in the fire, and revelations about the sergeant’s song prompted protests against the seeming racial insensitivity of the Madison police and fire departments. There were demands that the sergeant be fired, or at least punished beyond the five-day suspension that Mr. Couper meted out.

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When Mr. Couper recounted the events last month in his blog, he did so in the aftermath of the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice at the hands of police officers, and in recognition of a vast chasm between law enforcement officers and minority populations. And he did so as a police veteran and a minister who has devoted both parts of his career to closing that rift.

“In order to restore trust between police and the communities they serve, our nation’s police must collectively apologize,” he wrote. “It is what we need today to begin to heal the relationships between blacks and police. It is the only way to move past events of Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland and the residual effects we all have inherited from slavery, Jim Crow, and pernicious and residual racial discrimination.”