Chief defends Fort Worth police’s first use of tear gas on crowd in at least 30 years
For the first time in about 30 years, Fort Worth police used tear gas to disperse a crowd of protesters Sunday night after an hours-long peaceful standoff on the West 7th Street bridge.
Police Chief Ed Kraus defended the decision to use the gas during a press conference on Monday afternoon with Mayor Betsy Price and police monitor Kim Neal.
United Fort Worth, an advocacy group that had people at the protest, denounced the actions by police, calling it an over-militerized response and racist attack on peaceful protesters.
“Rather than keep their cool, FWPD officers unleashed a wave of terror that spanned both sides of the bridge, launching tear gas canisters and flash bangs and employing other crowd-control tactics to beat the peaceful protesters into submission,” Pamela Young, an organizer, said in a news release.
Kraus said protesters began to throw bottles of bleach and frozen water bottles at officers blocking the bridge at about 10 p.m. A firework was also detonated about that time. Tear gas was deployed about 30 minutes later, Kraus said.
The protest was peaceful for hours, beginning around 5 p.m. in downtown Fort Worth. The march began around 6:30 p.m. It marked the third day of protests in the city against police brutality and the killings of black people by police, sparked by the death of George Floyd, who died in the custody of Minneapolis police on May 25.
The protest drew about 300 people to the area. The officers who initially stuck near protesters were from the department’s bike patrol. Eventually, officers from the department’s SWAT and special response team were called. Troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety and deputies from the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office were also present.
Kraus said police were initially fine with the crowd’s movement toward the West 7th District. But he said officers near the front of the line heard that some people intended to vandalize the West 7th District, so they stopped them on the bridge.
Protests that have erupted across the United States have ended in vandalism and looting, with many people taking to social media to say police in various cities escalated the violence. Police have used tear gas and fired rubber bullets and pepper balls on protesters and reporters.
In New York City, a video shows an officer driving an NYPD vehicle into protesters. In Minneapolis, a group of officers who were enforcing curfew shot paint rounds at residents who were on their porch. Houston police have opened an investigation after a video shows a protester being trampled by an officer on a horse.
In Dallas, police have opened an internal investigation into two cases of police use of force that led to two hospitalizations, the Dallas Morning News reported.
Kraus said he wanted to keep the protests on Sunday peaceful and that he didn’t want to be the chief to approve tear gas for the first time in 30 years but said, “There is a point where you have to use the tools you’re trained to use.”
United Fort Worth argued that police blocked the peaceful march based on “a single vague unattributed comment from someone in the crowd.”
“The FWPD chose to force the marchers to stop on the bridge in order to keep them out of the high-end, predominately-white West 7th Street shopping and entertainment corridor,” the release said.
Several hundred marchers turned around and left. There was a stand-off on the bridge for about three hours before tear gas was used and arrests were made.
Of the 50 people arrested in Fort Worth on Sunday night, 25 did not live in the city and likely traveled to Fort Worth after Dallas and Denton enacted curfews, Kraus said.
“We do believe that people infiltrated the group of peaceful marchers,” Kraus said, adding that organizers attempted to get people to leave.
Krista Daniels, one of the organizers, drove to the bridge and encouraged people to leave, but a few people in the crowd shouted at her.
Daniels told the Star-Telegram that she and other organizers didn’t want anyone to get hurt but “they’re grown, they can make their own decisions.”
“What we want, we want like it has always been, we wanted to be a protest,” she said before other organizers whisked her off the bridge.
Young said on Monday that videos taken live from the protest depict what “can only be described as unwarranted escalation and wanton brutality against protesters at the hands of the Fort Worth Police Department.”
Kraus said a lot of the people who showed up Sunday night were not part of the peaceful groups that gathered the previous two nights.
A curfew in Fort Worth begins at 8 p.m. Monday.
This story was originally published June 1, 2020 at 2:24 PM.
