- The Fellowship of the S.P.O.T.S. in Covington aims to create designated skating spots around the city.
- Skaters have already begun making inroads with local leadership.
- The fellowship hopes to not only ease tensions between skaters and the police but also create shared community spaces.
Skateboarders and cops don’t always have the best relationships, even when there aren’t explicit rules against skateboarding on the books. But what if it didn’t have to be that way?
A new fellowship of skaters in Covington is trying to carve out designated spaces for skaters around the city, ease the local DIY skater community’s interactions with the police and maybe bring about some overall neighborhood improvements.
“All of my life up until now, here [in Covington] especially, it’s always felt like a criminalized thing,” said Sam Phillips, a Covington skater who first began developing the idea of the fellowship.
Phillips has dubbed the idea the S.P.O.T.S. Fellowship. The word is an acronym for Safe Places Offering Transitions for Skaters (although, as we’ll see, other people are welcome, too) and a reference to skaters’ habits of finding, well, spots around town with features ideal for skating…