Melissa Crum is an inclusion coach, leadership strategist and founder of Mosaic Education Network.
A July 2 incident involving Franklin County Commissioner Erica Crawley at the veterans' concert raises multiple legitimate questions.
The mistake is assuming we must choose which question matters.
An allegation of racial discrimination deserves serious, independent examination. A public official is also accountable for how sheuses public resources and authority. Both can be true.
The questions surrounding the VIP tickets are legitimate and should be examined through the appropriate ethics process. At the same time, they should not displace the allegation that five Black women were subjected to repeated credential checks and ultimately faced a police
response involving nine special-duty officers.
So, what does someone have to do to prove they belong?
At the concert, Crawley and her guests were repeatedly questioned about whether they had the right to be in the VIP area. The promoter later said they were authorized to access the VIP lounge and hospitality areas.
Now, months later, Crawley’s legitimacy is being questioned again. This time, through a growing stream of media coverage and online commentary about her conduct and allegations unrelated to the original encounter.
What happens when scrutiny of a Black woman’s legitimacy becomes the story itself?
When is the question no longer simply, “Did she have the right to be there?” At what point do we ask why her right to be there had to be established so many times in the first place? Who is presumed legitimate, and who is presumed suspect?
There was no allegation that the women were violent or threatened anyone. The dispute centered on wristbands and whether they belonged in a particular space. WOSU’s review of the footage reported that the group’s attitudes were also cited as a reason for removing them. Then, why does someone’s attitude warrant nine police officers?
If someone’s perceived “attitude” can turn a disagreement over concert access into a police response, we should ask whose attitude is being policed, what standard is being applied, and whether that standard is applied equally.
And then there is the restroom.
Officers followed Crawley into a restroom during the encounter.
What public-safety purpose required that escalation? Even if officers believed she was in the wrong area, where is the line between enforcing a venue’s rules and using law enforcement authority to police someone’s movement, tone, language, or decision to use the restroom?
These are questions the investigation should answer, not social media commentary or competing political narratives.
That distinction matters because the information surrounding this incident has shifted quickly.
Why were five Black women targeted?
The original question was whether five Black women were treated differently in a VIP space. Since then, coverage and online commentary have increasingly focused on Crawley’s conduct, including allegations about parking tickets, which the materials reviewed for this matter identify as unverified.
If those parking tickets exist, address them.
If Crawley’s use of public authority or county resources to obtain concert access involved an ethics violation, investigate it.
If the evidence establishes wrongdoing, accountability should follow.
But none of those questions answers whether Black women were treated differently by private security and police.
That is why the 250th anniversary of the United States becomes an uncomfortable backdrop.
This concert celebrated veterans and American patriotism. Crawley is a Navy veteran and an elected official. Yet neither her military service nor her elected position insulated her from questioning, challenges, or police escalation.
America’s 250th anniversary offers an opportunity to confront the contradictions between the nation’s ideals and the lived experiences of the people who inhabit it.
The tension is between America’s commitment, in principle, to equality and freedom and a history in which slavery, racial terror, segregation, mass incarceration and unequal treatment under the law have existed alongside those ideals.
That contradiction is relevant here.
As Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr. has argued, patriotism can become an abiding and uncritical love of an abstract idea of what a nation is, or what we hope it could be, that supersedes our responsibility to the actual human beings who live within it.
Love of country becomes meaningful through how we treat people in individual interactions and through the institutions that exercise power over their lives, including the police.
So can we hold public officials accountable for potential conflicts of interest while simultaneously examining whether Black people are treated differently by the institutions charged with enforcing rules?
Truly loving America
We must.
The ethics question does not prove racial discrimination.
And an allegation of racial discrimination does not excuse an elected official from ethics rules.
As James Baldwin wrote,“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
Multiple things can be true at the same time.
What should not be true is allowing one question to erase the other.
The racial-profiling allegation deserves the same seriousness, scrutiny and evidence that we expect from every accountability system. The answer should not depend on whether the person making the allegation has a title, whether we like the person or whether another allegation is easier to sensationalize.
The question is not whether Commissioner Erica Crawley deserves accountability.
The question is whether everyone deserves accountability and whether we are willing to demand it consistently.
Do not let scrutiny of Crawley become a substitute for scrutiny of the institutions that interacted with her.
Melissa Crum is an inclusion coach, leadership strategist and founder of Mosaic Education Network. She specializes in leadership development, equity, communication and organizational culture change. She is co-chair of the Columbus NAACP's Women in the NAACP Committee.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Crawley ethics probe erasing fact that 5 Black women were allegedly targeted | Opinion
