Q&A with Fort Worth Police Chief Ed Kraus: How will the department rebuild trust?
Fort Worth Police Chief Ed Kraus said he wants a chance to prove to the city that he is the right leader for the department.
In the eight months since he’s led the department, Kraus has made headlines several times. Critics wanted Kraus and other city leaders removed as a string of back-to-back officer-involved shootings plagued the city a month after he took charge. Because of those shootings, an independent review board was hired to evaluate the department’s procedures.
Others saw him as a welcoming leader who has the best of intentions for Fort Worth’s citizens. Last month, Kraus put himself on the street and chased down a man who ran from a crash near Interstate 20. The 52-year-old chief climbed over a fence as the suspect surrendered.
In an interview with the Star-Telegram, Kraus talked about his goals and hopes for the department, outlined his his efforts to strengthen hiring, and shared his plans to rebuild trust with the city’s residents. After serving as interim chief following the May 20 firing of Joel Fitzgerald, Kraus accepted the job permanently on Dec. 4.
Because of a gag order issued by the court in October, Kraus was not able to answer questions about the fatal shooting of Atatiana Jefferson by former officer Aaron Dean.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are your goals moving the Fort Worth Police Department into 2020, specifically when it comes to rebuilding trust with the city?
I call it an opportunity instead of a challenge. I came on under (Chief) Tom Windham, and he was building a community-based policing model in the Fort Worth Police Department. He started the neighborhood police officer programs. That’s what I grew up in the department doing and that’s my knowledge of policing. We got away from that after 9/11, which changed that community policing focus, not just in Fort Worth. The focus became, we have to prevent terrorism. It kind of got us away from some of the community policing things that we were doing. I think a return to that is the right way to build that trust. So the community is familiar with who is out there taking care of them. The best way to build trust with somebody is to sit down, talk to them. And that’s what we need to do more of.
What is your No. 1 goal for 2020?
My No. 1 goal, while I’m at the helm of the police department, will be just to build that trust and the legitimacy of the police department in the eyes of the community again.
Some people voiced concerns when you were permanently sworn in as chief that there weren’t any outside candidates considered and there was no forum prior. What would you like to say to the people who are disappointed about you being named?
Now that we’ve made this decision, let’s give me a chance and see if I live up to the expectations, not only of the city leaders but expectations that they as community members want for the leader of their department.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about officer-involved shootings, specifically of young black residents. What are you doing to reform use-of-force and how would you address these shootings moving forward?
We had nine officer-involved shootings in 2019, which was one less than the year before and one more than the year before that. So we trended about the same number that we’ve been trending for the past few years. Although it all happened in a relatively short time frame, it’s consistent with what we had in the past few years. That’s not to say we can’t do better and we should always be looking at ways to do better.
Part of the reason we have the independent policy advisory group coming in to look at our policies and training is to see if there’s something we could be doing better. That’s something we did at the beginning of the summer internally with our own use-of-force coordinator, having that individual reach out to other departments to see if we are in line with best practices and policies that other departments are using. And what we found is that we have pretty solid policies and training. But it never hurts to have an outside group come look at it.
(On Nov. 8, Fort Worth City Manager David Cooke hired an outside panel to investigate police procedures and to form recommendations on how officers can interact with the public. The panel includes national experts on a variety of policing issues including use of force and racial profiling and the review will include multiple public forums where the panelists are expected to hear directly from residents about their experiences with police.)
You hit on my next question already, but how do you feel about this independent review board coming in?
I have absolutely no problem with it. We’re trying to be as open and transparent as we can be. We’d like to be a leader of transparency among police departments across the country. And anything we can do to improve the department and make us more responsive to the community we serve is going to help.
You bring up a good point about transparency. We noticed today there was a Tweet detailing a recent homicide, and that’s something we’ve never really seen happen before. Is that move to that kind of transparency going to continue?
Some things we can be more open about than other investigations that are ongoing. We’re going to be limited to what we can put out on some of that stuff.
Some of the more critical police incidents, such as officer-involved shootings, we want to get any video and information out quickly. We drafted a internal policy on how better to do that. And I think we got much better. Sometimes these videos wouldn’t get released at all. Previously, we would have wait until after a grand jury or after criminal trial, which can be a couple years down the road. We decided that we wanted to be more proactive. Starting with some of the early shootings this summer, we did that with the East Berry shooting, we got the video release within four days. The one over at Woodhaven, we got released within 24 hours, and then the latest one, we released that within 12 hours.
Do you have a personal goal for when you’d like to release those videos (in officer-involved shootings)?
I would like to see them released within three days of the incident. Sometimes our hand is forced as it was in the last two shootings and we had to do it quicker. I don’t have a problem with doing it quicker. The issue is if you push to get something out quickly, you may not have as much time to review that. And so there may be issues where we put something in there that shouldn’t be in there or leave something out that should be in there. But the goal is to get it released as quickly as possible.
There was a speaker at City Council last month who pointed out a Facebook post from an apparent officer who used racially charged language in a post about the shooting of Jaquavion Slaton. Does the department have any anti-bias training and what does that look like?
We went through three different training courses on procedural justice, implicit bias to make officers aware of biases they may hold that they’re not even aware of. And then we do have policies in place for the way officers should behave, how they should address people and how they should use their social media in a responsible manner.
So if someone came to you with this officer’s Facebook post, what would happen next?
We have, as I said, policies in place, so it will go to internal affairs to be looked at. And if it is deemed to be an inappropriate post, the chain of command would make recommendations on what to do with that.
After the most recent officer-involved shooting, there were a lot of questions about the hiring process and standards for Fort Worth police officers. Are you looking at your hiring process in terms of strengthening it? And who are the types of people you’d like to hire?
Are we looking at policies? Of course we are. Anytime we see that we have a deficiency, we try to understand how did that happen and what do we need to do to shore it up and make it better?
We are looking at the hiring minimum standards, but also the processes that we use to review someone’s background.
As far as the type of person, we would like to get the humble public servant. Somebody that’s more about serving others than they are about using their authority. Look at what I talked about earlier with community policing and how we started that toward the late ’80s, early ’90s. And then we shifted into more of almost a warrior mindset that our officers had to be in and trying to get that shift back to servant leadership is is a struggle. And again, not just for the Fort Worth Police Department, but for policing in general.
Are there any incentives for police officers to live in Fort Worth and, if no, do you think there should be?
I think it would take some research. I don’t think that we want to make a blanket change and say this is something we’re going to do without having done some research that will say it’s going to benefit us.
We noticed that you got rid of the security detail that previous chiefs have had. Why?
When I became the interim chief I just did not see the need for the detail.
I’ve been a police officer in the city for 27 years. I know how to get from one location to the other. So it’s not a lack of familiarity with the city with me. And I have the same equipment and training and skills that every other officer we put out on the street has. I’m not putting a security detail on officers that definitely have a much more dangerous job than me, so I didn’t feel the need to have it.
I recently wrote about an anti-gang program that lowered violent crime in Richmond, California, significantly and I know the City Council talked about sending people to Richmond and San Antonio to see how their programs worked. Did that happen and what’s the status?
We did send representatives to Richmond and also to San Antonio for Stand Up SA. I think every city has to look at programs and determine if that is something that is going to work in their city and if it is, what format is that going to take?
I think it has value and I think it’s something that we could put money toward, and resources toward and get some benefit from. However, I don’t think it works here exactly like how it works in those other two cities. We have a core group that’s meeting to determine how that best works in the city of Fort Worth, but it is something I’m interested in pursuing.
Do you have an overall message you’d like to send to people who will read this story or watch the video?
Just that your police department works for you. I believe wholeheartedly that the citizens are the owner of the police department, that they should have a say in how they’re policed. Everybody’s opinion is different, so of course we have to find something that works for the city and for the majority of the people we serve.
But I understand that there are ways that we could be doing things better. When you are entrenched in a profession, you don’t always see everything. You have your own reality based on your experience and input you get, but you have to reach outside the profession, always looking for different things you can do to make things better, to improve things and you have to be able to be willing to take some risks.
