Fort Worth area police agree with Dallas chief: Their plates are too full

As a night cop, officer Chris CeBallos patrolled the streets of Arlington until sunrise for 20 years, unsure of what each shift might bring.

Sometimes he’d have to play the role of a chaplain for someone who lost a loved one. Other nights, he’d have to reason with someone who was drunk and belligerent.

“We wear many hats,” said CeBallos, a board member for the Arlington Municipal Patrolman’s Association. “And it's not always clear which one to wear first.”

Police officers and their roles in society have received heavy attention the last two weeks, most recently with the killing of officers in Baton Rouge Sunday.

The fatal shootings by police of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota prompted Black Lives Matter rallies across the country, including the one in downtown Dallas at the end of which five cops were killed by a gunman who expressed hate for white officers.

A few days after the shooting, an exhausted Dallas Police Chief David Brown went to a news conference with what sounded like a plea for help.

“We're asking cops to do too much in this country,” Brown said. “Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding — let the cop handle it. Not enough drug addiction funding — let's give it to the cop. Here in Dallas, we've got a loose dog problem — let’s have the cops chase loose dogs … that’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”

Fort Worth Police Chief Joel Fitzgerald echoed Brown’s comments at a community forum on the city’s east side Tuesday night.

When one citizen suggested police need to help teach children the values of right and wrong, Fitzgerald disagreed.

“It shouldn’t be the police department’s role to teach, in particular, how to act,” Fitzgerald told the crowd of about 200. “I think for a very long time, we’ve become the Swiss Army knife of social services. … There are many steps on the ladder before you should get to the police department being responsible for raising children.”

J.P. Mason, president of the Arlington Police Association and a 20-year cop in Arlington, said Chief Brown “hit the nail on the head.”

“Everything he said about Dallas applies in Arlington,” Mason said. “We are asked to be social workers, marriage counselors, pet wranglers, animal-control people and mental health liaisons. We have a lot on our plate, and sometimes that plate breaks.”

‘Very different world’

Criminal justice experts say the local cops’ concerns are justified, if not new.

A wide-ranging workload has “always been part of the informal job description,” said Tom Maijerus, a former Detroit police officer who teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos.

When Maijerus was a cop in the 1970s, he had friends at other departments who received calls to settle disputes between neighbors fighting over piles of leaves.

Mason, who spent eight years as a patrol officer before becoming a detective, remembers being called once to a house because a child wouldn’t eat dinner.

“You want to help,” Mason said, “but at the same time, that’s not a police issue.”

In Keller, officers are called “all the time” to resolve personal issues, said Capt. Brenda Slovak, who commands the suburb’s 28 patrol officers.

It’s not unusual for Keller officers to be called to a home because a child won’t go to school. Other times, Slovak said, an officer might be asked to settle a child-visitation dispute between divorced parents.

“I would say that, for a long time, the police have had responsibilities that go well beyond law enforcement,” said Phillip Lyons, a former Houston-area cop who’s the dean of the criminal justice college at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville. “But I think slowly, over time, the scope has expanded and the expectations have increased. It is a very different world now for police officers.”

Training solutions

Part of that different world is training officers how to deal with people who have mental illnesses and how to face the increased scrutiny police departments face when dealing with minority communities.

Lyons said communication skills and de-escalation skills are emphasized heavily during training now.

Over the years, training in cultural diversity, racial sensitivity issues, crisis intervention and mental health issues have been added to the law enforcement curriculum at the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service, which taught about 950 different courses last year, said Cullen Grissom, the program’s training director.

Outside training, the diversity of police forces could always be improved, Lyons said.

“One can’t help but be struck by how the face of the criminal justice system is different than the people who get caught up in it,” Lyons said.

At the community forum Tuesday, Fitzgerald, the Fort Worth chief, pointed to the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice as a way his department is being proactive

Fort Worth is one of six cities in the country participating in the Department of Justice-funded program.

All Fort Worth officers just completed four hours of procedural justice training through the program. The training focused on how officers’ interactions with the public shape the public’s view of police and willingness to obey the law, according to the initiative’s website.

Officers will also be trained on racial reconciliation and implicit bias.

The challenge, police say, isn’t as much preparing to handle a variety of situations as it is applying that preparation in the field.

“We know, as police officers, we’re asked to do a lot,” Fitzgerald said. “I do think, though, that we’re going to the extreme when we’re asking officers to make split-second judgments about somebody’s mental acuity or other things that you can’t deal with in a two-hour session with a psychologist.”

This story was originally published July 17, 2016 at 3:39 PM with the headline "Fort Worth area police agree with Dallas chief: Their plates are too full."