‘It all starts with respect.’ Interim Columbus police chief wants to rebuild trust, morale

It took one day riding along with a patrol cop to make Stoney Mathis want to be one.

Thirty-three years ago, the man just appointed Columbus’ interim police chief was a linebacker and defensive end on a championship college football team at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma, and was studying to become a college coach.

Then he chose an elective course in criminal justice that required accompanying a uniformed officer on patrol.

“After I rode with that police officer, I changed my major: I wanted to be a police officer,” Mathis, 54, said Monday during a news conference at the Public Safety Center. “I saw how engaged that police officer was, and I decided that’s the kind of cop I want to be.”

As he temporarily takes charge of a troubled agency plagued by personnel losses pinned to low morale and poor leadership, he continues to emphasize engaging with the public and with the people who work for him.

“Every time a police officer makes contact with a citizen, they either make a deposit or they make a withdrawal of respect that citizen has in law enforcement,” he told Monday’s gathering of officers, city leaders and press. “My goal is to make deposits, make deposits, make deposits.”

That investment in public trust pays dividends, he added: “So when somewhere around the country, somebody makes a withdrawal, I want the citizens of Columbus to say, ‘That’s not my police department. That’s not how we do things.’”

He said he has seen news reports of the controversies here, where Columbus Council ousted the city’s second Black police chief with a $400,000 severance agreement on April 6, and said he has encountered similar issues before.

Ex-Chief Freddie Blackmon’s supporters claimed he was subjected to racial discrimination. His detractors said his micromanagement and poor communications, among other issues, were driving off veteran officers the agency could not afford to lose.

“Reading in the paper, you know there’s a culture problem here in the Columbus Police Department,” he said. “It takes a little while to change the culture, but you can change the atmosphere very quickly, and that’s my goal, to change the atmosphere.”

He’s not starting with big changes or a specific set of priorities, he said, but he does have an initial focus.

“I’m going to come in and raise the level of morale, that’s my goal,” Mathis said. “Build relationships with the community, that’s my second goal.... My management style is I manage by walking around.”

‘The most rewarding thing’

Mathis is expected to hold the job for about six months as the city searches for a permanent chief, Mayor Skip Henderson said. Mathis was recommended by the Association of the Georgia Chiefs of Police, whom Henderson consulted.

The city will continue to ask that association for guidance, but likely will bring on a search firm and hold community meetings as it seeks a new chief, the mayor said.

Mathis is not a candidate.

“He’s not interested in a long-term, full-time job,” said Henderson, who thought Mathis a promising interim because of his management style, saying “he works through people, not around them.”

Mathis acknowledged he is here short-term: “We’re going to try to do this as quickly as possible, without making any monumental changes. I want to make some slight tweaks in what we’re going here, because if the citizens have a perceived distrust of the police department, oftentimes perception is reality.”

He got his formative experience with the Henry County Police Department, starting in 1995 and rising to the rank of deputy chief by 2010. He was appointed chief of the Chattahoochee Hills Police Department in 2016, and headed the Fairburn Police Department from 2018 to 2022, when the city reported a 52% reduction in its crime rate.

Fairburn had a population of about 20,000 people and a force of 50 officers, he said. Columbus has a population of around 210,000 and a budgeted police force of 488, though that recently dropped to fewer than 300.

The two cities have some common traits, such as a majority-Black population, Mathis said.

“I was with the city of Fairburn for almost four years. It’s 70-to-75% African-American, and I built a very stable, quality relationship with the community, and I plan on doing the same thing here in Columbus,” he said.

In Henry County, he headed a patrol division of around 180 officers, and learned the value of regularly interacting with residents, he said. His community engagement efforts earned him an officer of the year award from the NAACP, he said, and he was promoted to deputy chief soon afterward.

He had 300 employees to oversee when he left Henry County to head the Chattahoochee Hills department, with 15 officers.

“It just wasn’t exciting enough for me,” Mathis said. “It didn’t have enough community to address the crime.”

But it had another benefit.

Asked for his most rewarding moment in law enforcement, since he chose that career decades ago on a ride-along in Oklahoma, he did not hesitate.

In 2017, the Chattahoochee chief was on another ride-along with a patrol officer called to a medical emergency.

“The dispatch said, ‘It’s a lady having a baby,” he recalled.

The patrol officer turned to his chief for reassurance.

“We both looked deathly afraid,” Mathis said.

A teenager flagged them to the house, where they rushed in and heard screams from a back room. They found one woman on the phone and the other giving birth, the baby’s head crowning.

“I never watched it on YouTube; I didn’t sleep in a Holiday Inn Express the night before,” Mathis said of his naivete, “but I said, ‘Push!’ ... She pushed that little baby right out in my hands.”

The woman’s mother, who was on the phone with 911, told him: “You’ve got to squeeze the nose and blow in the face,” so he did. “I heard the baby cry for the first time, the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in law enforcement.”

The newborn was a boy, he said. They tied the umbilical cord with a shoe string, and gave the baby to the mother.

At 6-foot-3, Mathis still has the stature of a linebacker. He admits he no longer has the speed.

But he does not intend to move slowly in building trust with rank-and-file officers and the community they serve, in his new job, he said.

“A lot of times, police officers will treat the citizens exactly the way they’re being treated by their supervisors,” he said. “So my goal is to have our supervisors treat our officers with the utmost respect, so that our police officers treat our citizens with the same respect. And I think it all starts with respect.”