Just a Mississippi farm boy. What's wrong with being a Mississippi farm boy? Well, nothing, except that the rest of us wouldn't treat a Mississippi farm boy the same as we'd treat a man who has a doctoral degree and a book to prove that he is a thinker of deep thoughts.

Ed Reed has gone to see the wizard and come back with proof that he is as good as the next person. Validation.

The thing is, when I met him, I was more interested in the person than the book, more affected by his feelings than by his degrees.

Reed, 48, works as an aide to King County Councilman Larry Gossett and teaches part time at a couple of community colleges. His book is "The Politics of Community Policing."

Reed studied policing in Seattle, shuttling back and forth from Arizona, where he was working on his doctorate, a long way from the farming roots.

Reed's family owned 160 acres in Mississippi from the 1860s to the 1960s. They grew cotton, corn, watermelons, peas and the like. For excitement, he'd stand out by the road and watch big trucks roar past.

Farming didn't pay much, though. "I picked 200 pounds of cotton once and earned $5," he says. Then, too, his father wasn't the best farmer. The family left the farm and moved into Vicksburg about the time the civil-rights movement was in full bloom. It was all new to Reed.

But some things in his family life had more impact. His mother died just as he was entering his teens. His father remarried, and Ed, feeling he didn't fit into the new family, left home to live in the colored YMCA, where he stayed until he was done with high school.

He was 40, helping the New York state government find alternatives to incarceration, when he decided to get his Ph.D.

He went from $40,000 a year to $10,000 and from a car to a bicycle. Four years later, in 1995, he had his degree and a dissertation that he wanted to turn into a book.

He found publishers, but the publishers wanted something catchier than what he'd written. They also wanted to have their friends quoted in the book, and their friends had decidedly more radical ideas about the subject than Reed's own.

He says, however, that he came around to their views of policing, concluding that community policing in Seattle had been little more than a public-relations exercise.

In the book, he argues that community policing as practiced in Seattle from 1985 to 1993 was done to comfort a few influential middle-class residents in Southeast Seattle.

"Community policing keeps us from getting to hard-core issues," Reed says. He means social and economic problems the police didn't create and can't fix.

All police need to be trained to react differently to people. "We should have police officers trained to snatch a kid off a fence and say, `Look, son, I know you have problems, but . . .' "

He says, "Women police officers often take a different tack. They talk to the person.

Reed's wife is from Mississippi, and her father was the first black police officer in his town to be allowed to arrest white people. That kind of history leaves a residue. White police have always been able to arrest black people, but it hasn't always been the other way around.

It means some of us have reason for asking whose police are the police, and whose interest do they serve?

The answer used to be clear, but it isn't so pat now. Like every other institution in our society, police departments have people who push against the weight of tradition. His book argues they haven't pushed things far enough.

The book is academic and clearly had too many people imposing their ideas on Reed's research. Now that he has that past him, I hope Reed will trust that he is somebody.

"I wanted a Ph.D. to overcome all of what I grew up with, so that I could hold my head up high and talk to people and have that stamp of approval," he says.

"I had to get a victory. There are a lot of us who don't feel good about ourselves. It's validation we hunger for."

Jerry Large's column appears Sundays and Thursdays in the Scene section of The Seattle Times. You can reach him c/o The Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111. Phone: 206-464-3346. Fax: 206-464-2261. E-mail: jlarge@seattletimes.com
 

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