Bowie Police show up at columnist’s home
False report of murder prompts Sunday response
Afalse report of murder prompted Bowie City Police to respond to the home of Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. early Sunday morning.
Pitts said he was temporarily handcuffed until officers determined the call was a fake and there was no one hurt inside the home.
“The objective was to intrude on my life and cause terror and disruption,” Pitts said in an interview Monday. “I suspect the person wouldn’t have been crushed if there were violence out of it.”
There wasn’t — and Pitts isn’t letting the situation get in the way of his job at the Miami Herald, where he has worked since 1991, and remotely from Bowie since 1995. He is — to quote Capital Gazette reporter Chase Cook’s line after an attack there in June 2018 — putting out a damn column, he said.
In 2004, Pitts won a Pulitzer for commentary for pieces, including “Logic tells us: No death penalty,” “To irate readers: Race has always benefited whites,” and “Gays may be hope for marriage.”
Bowie Police Chief John Nesky said that at 4:30 a.m. Sunday a man called the department’s non-emergency line and said he had killed his wife and would shoot at police when they arrived, sharing an address.
Nesky said the response was patrol-only — no SWAT team. Police began setting up a perimeter around the house; then a dispatcher found a number to someone inside the house and called that number, Nesky said. Pitts picked up and the dispatcher told him to go to the front door, Nesky said, where police gave him verbal instructions and handcuffed him. Then they got everyone else out of the house, he said.
“It was a false call,” Nesky said. “There was no violence or weapons in the home.”
Nesky said police are investigating the source of the call.
Pitts, whose columns are distributed nationally, said he can’t definitively prove that he was targeted for his writing.
“I think in all likelihood it’s probably what it looks like,” he said. “Somebody didn’t like something I wrote in one of my columns.”
In 2007, he was the target of death threats from neo-Nazis for his commentary.
“You take appropriate precautions and then you get on with your life,” he said.
Pitts has written about police misconduct and abuse, including a column last month titled “Police misuse of force has no easy solution.”
“I feel strongly that if you’re given the privilege of having this public megaphone, then you have the obligation to use it to say something,” Pitts said. “To try to say something that’s true, that’s perhaps not being said elsewhere by other people. I think it would be a waste of time to have this megaphone and not say something.”
For his next column, to be published Wednesday, he said, he plans to compare two police responses — one to his own home for an alleged murder and barricade, and the second to a pair of shoplifters in Phoenix recently.
He said Sunday morning that Bowie police kept a calm demeanor and deescalated the situation, which kept him calm as well.
“You know, in a volatile environment like that anything can happen,” he said. “They were very professional.”
He wants to compare that to the recent incident in Phoenix in which officers threatened to shoot a couple when responding to a report of shoplifting, according to CBS News.
“People accuse me all the time of being anti-police, and I always tell them, I’m not anti-police, I’m anti-bad police. And this is sort of a picture perfect demonstration of what I mean,” he said.
Nesky said the incident is under investigation. He also credited his officers and Pitts for keeping cool during the interaction.
“Things like this could end very differently,” he said.