14 Fort Worth police officers appealed firings since 2014. Half won their jobs back
Fort Worth police officers who are fired have a 50% chance of getting their jobs back if they appeal their suspensions, the likely result of a decades-old system that was put in place to protect officers from frivolous lawsuits and complaints.
That same process now keeps so-called “bad apples” from being easily removed by departments across the country, experts said. And it keeps them available for rehire by other jurisdictions.
Thirty-three officers have been fired from the Fort Worth Police Department since 2014. Of them, 14 appealed the decision and seven were awarded their jobs back, according to records obtained by the Star-Telegram.
An arbitrator who oversees appeal cases, a former internal affairs investigator and experts who study police unions said the system isn’t perfect but they offered few real solutions. Many states — like Texas — explicitly protect police in the state’s Bill of Rights. However, many said transparency and a national database of fired officers would be a step in the right direction.
The issue of police discipline has been highlighted by the revelation that Derek Chauvin, the officer in Minneapolis charged with murder in the death of George Floyd, had 17 complaints on his record, yet was still training officers.
And then on Monday, the Supreme Court decided not to reexamine the qualified immunity doctrine, which protects police and government officials from lawsuits over their conduct.
The Fort Worth Police Department declined to provide someone to speak on the topic.
Transparency
Bau Tran, the former Arlington officer who shot and killed O’Shae Terry in 2018, had at least six disciplinary actions taken against him, according to court documents. They included accusations that he used too much force, lied about a suspect, threatened someone, misused his patrol vehicle, and failed to arrest and handcuff a woman suspected of a felony. But he wasn’t fired until he was indicted on a murder charge in Terry’s death.
Former Balch Springs police officer Roy Oliver was suspended for 16 hours over anger management issues. An email from prosecutors who witnessed Oliver have an outburst in court in 2013 said the former officer was a “scary person to have in our workroom.” But he kept his job and was convicted of murder in 2018 after killing high school freshman Jordan Edwards a year earlier.
So at what point do departments say, enough is enough?
Ray Dietrich, a former police officer turned pro-police advocate who said he has happily fired many bad cops, agrees the system is broken and that internal politics often play a part in an officer’s punishments. While working in California, he saw police chiefs fire officers knowing they’d win their jobs back.
“They thought, ‘Oh he’ll get a year off without pay and learn his lesson that way,’” Dietrich said, adding that the recommendations from internal affairs would sometimes be ignored.
One of the issues he saw is that there’s no punishment standard across the board at the state or federal level. States and local jurisdictions differ in their protections for police and union contracts.
Asked what can be done to fix the system, Dietrich said, “There’s no clear answer.”
“It is frustrating because the protections are for the good ones,” he said. “They’re there for the guys doing their jobs every day and those protections are there because in the big picture we want to protect the good cops and shield them from frivolous lawsuits. It’s got to change somehow and I don’t know what the answer is.”
Martin Weinberg, an Alabama-based attorney who represents civilians in police misconduct and brutality cases, believes more transparency would hold department leaders accountable and prevent fired officers from getting jobs elsewhere.
“There is no national database that covers police misconduct or firings,” he said.
But even so, some officers’ pasts are known but they still get picked up by other departments. In Fort Worth, Chief Ed Kraus fired five officers who didn’t call for medical help when a man they were arresting said he couldn’t breathe and was dying. Christopher Lowe, 55, died in the back of a police SUV in 2018 while the officers conspired to lie on their records to avoid guarding him at the hospital, according to officers’ termination papers.
Two of those officers, Daniel Pritzker and Mitchell Miller, won their appeals and got their jobs back after going through additional training. Before being rehired in Fort Worth, Pritzker and Miller were hired by Parker County Sheriff Larry Fowler. Fowler said at a public meeting in February that Pritzker and Miller gaining their Fort Worth jobs back was a loss for him.
Meanwhile, Officer Tiffany Bunton, who is Lowe’s niece and the second vice president of the Fort Worth Police Officers’ Association — the union that helps protect officers and make sure they’re getting due process rights — said that neither officer should have been given their jobs back.
“They set a bad tone for all of my brothers and sisters in blue who are genuinely doing good,” she said. “We have to hold each other accountable.”
Dietrich said fired officers are often picked up by other departments because the applicant pool has shrunk.
“Applications used to be 1,000 per position and now it’s 100 and instead of raising standards they’ll have to lower them because the pool is smaller,” he said. “It happened in the 1990s, it happened in the mid-2000s. When positions are open they have to fill them.”
Aaron Dean, the former Fort Worth Police officer who fatally shot Atatiana Jefferson in October 2019, was hired despite having been charged with simple assault while a student at UT Arlington.
Dean said in the interview the charge involved “a young lady at the school flirting with me. I just wanted to respond, see how it would go. It escalated a bit. I touched her inappropriately.”
He also said he wanted to be a police officer because he never ended up joining the military and wanted “to do some of those same things without having to deploy overseas.”
The lack of transparency extends to disciplinary actions that don’t end in firings. The Star-Telegram requested a year’s worth of summaries regarding disciplinary actions taken against Fort Worth police officers. The newspaper received 54 pages of heavily redacted data that show more than 200 internal affairs investigations in 2019.
Only 24 summaries were left unredacted, because the cases were closed.
Officers were disciplined for events ranging from being involved in traffic accidents to excessive use of force, violating the social media policy, and selling a police-issued weapon to a pawn shop.
Arbitration and other protections
In Fort Worth, officers who are fired or suspended can file for an appeal hearing with the help of a union attorney.
The arbitrator’s decision is final.
Professor Martin Malin from the Chicago-Kent College of Law is an arbitrator in Chicago and said the process protects against bias.
“Of course you’re assuming everyone who wins their job back should have been fired in the first place,” he said. “One of the functions of an arbitration hearing is that it guards against different treatment. It guards against implicit bias where you have a law enforcement officer who is a person of color and gets a harsher discipline than someone who is similar in offense and work history but is white.”
In the last five years, the Fort Worth officers who were awarded their jobs back were for various reasons.
▪ In 2014, Larry Gulley was accused of assaulting his teenage daughter and was fired after being charged with assault with bodily injury of a family member. Then, the charge was reduced to disorderly conduct after the “victim changed her story,” according to the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office.
▪ In 2016, Sgt. A.J. Williams was charged with theft after being accused of taking shoes and a video game from a house while serving a search warrant. He was acquitted of the charges and arbitrator Bill Detwiler said Williams’ firing was biased. He took the shoes because a deputy chief gave him permission to use them as “props” by undercover officers, documents say. He took the video game for use in the office during down time.
▪ From 2009 to 2010, officer James Dunn falsified the times he issued traffic tickets in order to get overtime pay. He won his job back six years later with $400,000 back pay. Arbitrator Norman Bennett concluded that while Dunn “engaged in negligent misconduct” by writing inaccurate times, he did not intentionally falsify the documents.
▪ Kenneth Pierce was fired in 2017 after he ordered another officer to use a Taser on a Black woman who called for help and was arrested. The police department’s use-of-force expert wrote Pierce’s behavior was “well within the FWPD Use of Force policy and falls in line with what is commonly taught to both recruits and incumbents.”
▪ John Souther was fired after failing to take a required fitness for duty test. But an arbitration hearing revealed that he might not have had proper instruction to take the test. If he took and passed the test, the arbitrator ruled he could have his job back.
Supporters of arbitration processes say teachers have similar protections. In Fort Worth, Georgia Clark won her teaching job back after she appealed her firing. She asked President Donald Trump on Twitter to crack down on immigration at Carter-Riverside High School. The school district is appealing Clark’s reinstatement.
Police unions
The Fort Worth City Council will vote in August to authorize a meet and confer agreement with the Fort Worth Police Officers’ Association, the union that represents the police department.
Part of the agreement allows for seniority to influence officers’ schedules, which opponents say often leads to less experienced officers being paired on night shifts. Officer Aaron Dean killed Atatiana Jefferson during a routine welfare check during a night shift.
The agreement also outlines what would happen if an officer is charged with a misdemeanor or felony, which can be anything from a 45-day suspension with or without pay to an indefinite suspension depending on the level of charge and criminal court outcome — and how an internal investigation should be handled (this process is not new).
Professor Tamara Lee, a labor law in the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, is critical of how police unions run. While many of the forms of protection seen in police unions are also in other professional unions (like teachers) Lee argues that other careers don’t come with the caveat that you might shoot and kill someone.
“The other thing is that there are usually state laws that add even extra protection for police,” Lee said, adding that there’s overall more constitutional protections for police officers.
“Police are allowed to have weapons and are allowed to use deadly force in some situations and the only thing they have to prove is that they were in fear or that the person they were trying to arrest or whatever was trying to resist. Some of that is part of a union contract, some of that is state and local laws and some of that is the judicial.”
The Fort Worth City Council on June 2 tabled the union vote until August.
But the council can’t take action on changing how police are disciplined because that falls under Texas law. But it is possible a citizen review board could make the process more transparent — and that is something the council can control.
Fort Worth City Councilwoman Ann Zadeh said she’s been a longtime supporter of the review board and that the process to form it has been slow because it needs to fit the needs of what Fort Worth residents want.
“What the board could do is still being decided because we have a brand new police monitor who began in early March,” Zadeh said.
Kim Neal, the new police monitor, wanted to meet with community groups but the outbreak of COVID-19 about the time she started has made it difficult, Councilwoman Kelly Allen Gray said.
“I know she has been looking at different policies, procedures, holding meetings with the chief and the (police officers) association,” Gray said. “I think it would be premature to say what police reforms should happen when we haven’t actually had an opportunity to hear from our police monitor.”
Neal did not respond to an email requesting an interview.
Both Gray and Zadeh said the need for community input has been a top concern from constituents.
“I’ve always been on the side of city staff trying to engage with the public and trying to encourage people to participate by going to public meetings,” Zadeh said. “We also have to meet people where they are. I don’t want to dictate when and how people are heard and I think we’re constantly looking for ways to reach out and learn how to better communicate.”
This story was originally published June 16, 2020 at 5:30 AM.
