A credit to his badge

Cmdr. Ronald Freeman had the city’s back

There was no typical day at the office for Ronald Freeman, the longtime Pittsburgh police detective and commander.

In 1977, he and two colleagues hypnotized a witness to learn more about a homicide they were investigating. In 1993, he helped unravel the story behind the mummified remains of a 2-year-old girl found in a city housing project. In 1995, a photographer captured an image of the detective crouching beside a car in Allentown, a shooting victim’s leg dangling from a passenger seat. In 1999, Mr. Freeman, despite his dislike of heights, talked a shooting suspect off of the roof of an East Liberty building.

After Mr. Freeman died Wednesday at 81, former colleagues praised his doggedness, investigative skills and human touch. But he contributed something else, too — a sense of calm to a city wrestling with population loss, industrial decline and the plague of drugs and other kinds of crime from the 1970s through the 1990s. His was the face often seen on television, his the name often quoted in the newspapers, as detectives tried to solve one violent crime or another. Bespectacled and even-tempered, his daily uniform a shirt and tie, gun on his right hip, he gave the impression of having the crisis in hand. His involvement was reassuring, even to suspects.

“He allowed me to come closer and closer. He said he didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Mr. Freeman recounted after talking 22-year-old Carlos Clark from the East Liberty roof 18 years ago. After nearly an hour of negotiations, Mr. Clark left the roof on a ladder commandeered from a cable TV truck.

The sense of assurance that Mr. Freeman projected went hand in hand with his willingness to discuss cases and keep the public informed. These days, many police officers duck the public eye or use so much jargon that they sound like automatons. Mr. Freeman was as available, direct and forthcoming as he could be.

Amy Freeman, one of Mr. Freeman’s daughters, said it “was impossible to separate who he was from his job.” In the same way, many of Mr. Freeman’s contemporaries considered him and the department one and the same. Mr. Freeman, both shot and stabbed on the job, did far more than duty required.