Retired St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department Sergeant Leo Lewis is a jolly, good fellow, which no one n colleagues or citizens n could deny.
“He is an excellent person, and he was an excellent cop who was really concerned about the citizens,” said Officer Amy Parker-Stayton, who attended Lewis’ retirement celebration recently at Laclede Station Bar and Grill in Midtown.
About 300 police officers continually stopped by Lewis’ retirement party, wishing him well.
“One day Leo put me in his car and said, ‘One day you’re going to make lieutenant, and what you need to remember is to treat people like you want to be treated,” Six District Commander Mary Edwards-Fears said of Lewis, a 39-year veteran of the force.
Parker-Stayton said she will miss his presence and personality.
“You would know when he was at the station, because he was loud and walked in singing those Army songs,” Parker-Stayton said.
The loud, down-to-earth officer didn’t won’t a retirement party, explaining that he’s used to giving instead of receiving, but Lt. Donnell Tanksley insisted.
“We had to do it n he was an excellent cop and our most senior sergeant,” said Tanksley.
Lewis is the last law enforcement officer to retire from the 1969 Police Academy class, which was comprised of city and county jurisdictions at the time.
Lewis move to St. Louis from Texarkana, Ark. in 1964, when black people were still shuffled to the back of the bus, until he reached the Mason Dixon Line.
Before coming to St. Louis, Lewis picked cotton for 3 cents an hour and remembers being 14 before houses in the South had indoor electricity and 18 before they had indoor plumbing.
Lewis grew up with a twin sister and had nine other brothers and sisters, all of whom were raised by his mother. His father, a sharecropper, died before he was born.
After making a meager living picking cotton, Lewis enlisted in the U.S. Army, from 1962 to 1964, and headed to St. Louis immediately after, looking for “opportunity.”
“By ‘opportunity,’ I mean I was looking for retirement benefits,” Lewis said.
“And the police department was like the military,” Lewis said n the retirement packages were favorable. After 39 years of service, Lewis will amass significantly more than 50 percent of his on-duty pay.
Lewis said he will remain in St. Louis in his North St. Louis two-family home, which he said the Army’s G.I. Bill helped him buy.
“The neighborhood has been up and down, but I like it,” he said.
But Lewis pointed out how people in the South could sleep with their doors open and how today in St. Louis elders have to go inside by nightfall.
“We used to have beat officers and we talked to the people n that’s what I liked, because I was more interested in crime prevention and service,” Lewis said of police work.
“I liked the sociology part and I knew what abuse of power meant, you see, because this is same power that said we had to ride in the back of the bus in the old South,” Lewis said.
Tanksley said Lewis was “grass-roots” in outlook.
“He believed that we should take care of the basics, because he believed that if we took care of the small stuff, they wouldn’t get a chance to do the big stuff,” Tanksley said.
Lewis became a sergeant in 1976 and one year later initiated “the train,” where several officers would trail one another through neighborhoods and arrest people violating ordinances. Lewis said it was his way of preventing crime.
“It was fine as long as you were fair with people,” Lewis said.
“If they needed locking up, then you would lock them up. But that didn’t mean you should disrespect them.”