Charlie Ings was Orlando’s first black detective
For about 15 years, black police officers in Orlando only patrolled the city’s black neighborhoods. They also were never assigned white partners, nor were they permitted to arrest white people. Until Charlie Ings. Ings, the father of Orlando City Commissioner Sam Ings, died Saturday. He was 83.
He retired from OPD in 1991 after a 25-year career highlighted by busting burglars and bolita rings, solving sex crimes and forming lasting relationships across the community, his son said.
As a child, Sam Ings said he remembers his father receiving phone calls from the community, tipping him off on leads.
“The phone calls would be from citizens that told him who was responsible for a robbery, a shooting or a homicide — any of those kinds of things,” Sam Ings said. “That’s the type of relationship he had with the public.”
“That community-oriented policing aspect always resided with me and when I joined the police department,” said Ings, who was first elected to the City Council in 2006 after a 30-year career at OPD.
Charlie Ings was hired in 1965 after working for seven years in the city’s parks department and retired in 1991 as an honorary deputy chief.
After his law-enforcement career, he went to work as an investigator for then-State Attorney Lawson Lamar. However, his tenure there was short-lived because of a stroke, Samuel Ings said. In that brief period, he backed up judge’s dockets by ensuring defendants showed up for their court hearings.
Charlie Ings, who graduated from Rollins College with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, also served on the board of the Orlando Union Rescue Mission,
was involved in the local Fraternal Order of Police and joined the Omega Psi Phi fraternity with his son.
He had six children, and his wife passed away in 2006 from lung cancer.
In 2017, Charlie Ings visited the new OPD station on South Street and brought his old brown badge. He showed it off to the new generation of homicide detectives, who found it funny that previous generations of officers didn’t wear blue as they do today.
In 1965, 14 years after OPD began hiring black officers, Ings was assigned to work with Capt. Charlie Edwards, who was white. The two were the first interracial pair in the department’s history and were partnered together after Edwards asked to work with Ings. They worked in west Orlando together for two years.
“I learned a lot,” Edwards said in a 1991 Orlando Sentinel story profiling Ings’ retirement. “I owe a lot to Charlie Ings. I learned how to treat people like I’d like to be treated.”
Edwards died in 2002 of complications from a stemcell transplant.
City Commissioner Tony Ortiz, also a former officer, said he’d often see Charlie Ings at events and always with a smile. The two never worked at the department together, but he said Ings was around often.
“He was iconic, he was a gentleman, he was diplomatic, he was ethical,” Ortiz said. “He made the culture shine by the way he acted and by the way he dealt with people.”
Lt. Dave Arnott, a special assistant for public safety to Mayor Buddy Dyer, said younger officers and even people Ings arrested didn’t wanted to disappoint him.
“Accountability was a huge thing with him,” Arnott said. “His integrity was second to none. For me, I’ll never forget that.”