The city manager in Ferguson was quoted talking about how your media relations and community relations experience made you the strongest candidate. What about crime and police work?

Well, what people don’t realize is that the community relations aspect of it is very critical to solving crime. We not only solve crime, we prevent crime because of the relationship. When the relationship is bad, that suffers. Police officers come into a neighborhood 10 hours a day, but it’s the people who live there who know what’s going on. If they don’t want to talk to the police or deal with the police, you’re not going to solve anything and you’re certainly not going to prevent anything.

You talk a lot about leadership and how that can shape a police department.

I took this job for a specific reason. I have said it time and again: I was mistreated by police officers. I saw the way police officers acted in my community. I was determined to be a better service provider than I had gotten.

What crime problems does Ferguson face?

Like the rest of the nation, we’re seeing not so much an uptick in crime, but actually an uptick in crimes committed by younger people. The new phenomenon is with regard to social media, you disrespect me on social media, I’ve got to do something dramatic so it can be posted on social media so I can get my street cred back. For a 51-year-old guy, that’s kind of something new for me to wrap my head around. So it’s important for me to keep listening to this generation of police officers who grew up attached to their cellphones and attached to Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram. We’ve got to get their input, because they’re the ones who are going to offer some solutions.

Were there special challenges you faced as a black police officer, particularly starting out?

The biggest challenge is that, ingrained in the American fabric there is a disconnect between the African-American community and the police department. A lot of it is for historical reasons, some of it is for things that happen that reinforce those old demons, and so as a police officer early on, both communities had a problem knowing how to look at you and how to perceive you.

You think that’s changed?

I don’t think it changed, but the challenges and reasons are different. Some things have happened because we do have police officers who don’t do the job the way it’s supposed to be done. You have police officers who bring their biases to the job. We can move the department ahead 100 steps, and you take one of those incidents — one incident, first of all, that’s very real to the person — but also played to that historical narrative, and it’s a whole lot steps back, more than you have been able to advance. I don’t know how we get past that challenge. I don’t know if that will happen in my lifetime. It is certainly my goal or my mission.

Have you ever faced direct — or indirect — racism as a police officer? The law enforcement forum LeoAffairs.com has some pretty racist people on it, and they don’t criticize you without mentioning in a negative way that you are black.