Opinion | Decatur’s mayor could have been a hero. He went a different direction

Tab Bowling has a problem. 

This is not a secret to anyone, except Bowling, the Decatur mayor who has been under siege for nearly a year now – ever since the day an officer on his police force shot dead Stephen Perkins in his front yard. 

Since that day, Bowling has ducked and ran and dodged. He has made excuses and backtracked. He has tried to placate and tried to get tough. He’s just flat disappeared at times. A couple of weeks ago, he even tried to cut a deal and quit. 

None of it has worked. 

Because Tab Bowling is wrong. And even worse, he has been unwilling to properly address the wrongdoing that everyone sees. 

And it is eating Bowling absolutely alive. 

On some level, I suppose, that is good – that the mayor has a conscience and it is troubling him – but it has yet to prompt the level of action and responsibility that the Perkins shooting and its aftermath should have received from a mayor truly looking to set things right. 

Instead, Bowling has done a sort of political two-step and shuffle. Tough talk coupled with benign action, and a side dose of whining and self-pity. 

And that has been Bowling’s biggest problem – this wishy-washy, poor-me, leave-me-alone, I’m-on-your-side, you’re-terrorizing-my-grandkids double talk that has resulted in pretty much everyone being angry at the mayor. 

The worst part is this should have been simple. It is not a complicated matter. 

We’ve all seen the videos by this point. The story is well known. Decatur Police officers, working outside of department policy, escorted a repossession tow-truck driver to Perkins’ home in the dead of night – after a previous confrontation between the driver and Perkins, during which Perkins, in his own front yard and believing (correctly) that his truck shouldn’t be repo’d, was carrying a firearm. Those cops did not make their presence known, instead chose to hide themselves and their vehicles. 

When Perkins emerged to confront the driver a second time, cops sprang from the shadows. Perkins, holding his pistol, never had a chance to comply with a command to “get one the groun…” before he was shot dead. The public didn’t need a slo-mo breakdown or a bootlicking PR guy to know that they witnessed someone being murdered. 

But just to drive it home, after the shooting, Decatur Police, unaware that several security cameras on neighboring homes had captured the entire incident, released a completely bogus statement in which Perkins was cast as the bad guy who refused commands to drop his weapon and threatened cops. 

And then we all saw those videos. 

Public outrage ensued. Protests began. 

Those protests haven’t stopped, primarily because Bowling has refused repeatedly to do the one thing that should have been done an hour after those videos hit social media. 

Remove police Chief Todd Pinion and clean house at DPD.  

Pinion’s cops blatantly disobeyed department policy. They put themselves in an awful position and an innocent man lost his life. And then his department set about trying to cover up those bad acts by blaming the innocent dead man. All of that had to include higher-ups within DPD. 

Why would anyone in Decatur ever again trust that man to run an honest police department? 

And that’s before we even get into the abuses and mistreatment of protestors by a handful of Decatur cops. Videos of some of those incidents have drawn outrage as well, and it has become glaringly obvious that the department has a serious discipline issue. 

The only person who apparently can’t see this is Bowling. 

Even as the protests outside of his home continued. Even as the public comments at every council meeting inevitably devolved into people calling for him to resign. 

Instead of doing the obviously right thing, Bowling has literally tried everything else. From leaving the council meetings so he didn’t have to hear the bad things to trying to implement an unconstitutional ban on protesting to trying to trade his job for the protests outside his home to stop. He’s tried it all. And none of it has worked. 

On Monday, he tried one more thing: Defiance. 

Bowling told WAFF-48 TV that he was going to finish his term as mayor because the protestors, with whom he met to negotiate his resignation in exchange for a break in the protests, released audio of their meetings. 

Ah, swell, nothing like having a mayor who’s only staying on the job to get back at protestors. 

But, really, it doesn’t much matter at this point. Whether Bowling ducks out a month from now or a year from now, his tenure as a mayor able to affect change is over. And it’s his own fault. 

Bowling could have been the hero of this story. He could have made a couple of tough, but obvious, decisions, addressed the very valid concerns of citizens about their police department and set the city on a new, peaceful course. He could have headed off all of this long before Decatur became a national headline and ground zero for one of the most successful and consistent displays of public protest in a long, long time. 

Instead, Bowling tried to take the easy way out. And it’s been nothing but a hard time.