THE 911 CALL CAME IN on July 24, 2012, an afternoon when the temperature in Dallas had soared to ninety-seven degrees. “A man with his hands tied behind him is being dragged into a drug house by five or six Latino men with guns!” the unidentified caller told the operator. The location: Bourquin Street in Dixon Circle, a historically black neighborhood in South Dallas. Within seconds, two officers were dispatched with the emergency code that sends cops speeding, full lights and sirens, to an alleged kidnapping in progress.
The cops screeched up to the front of the house. They did not notice a kidnapping, but through the front window, they spotted a scene in the living room: a group of young men gathered around a table covered with illegal drugs and a gun nearby. Once the guys noticed the officers, they scattered in every direction. One of them grabbed the gun. The officers, unsure of who was carrying the weapon, bolted after them.
While some suspects slipped away, one man was apprehended in the front yard. Another led a cop on a wild and long foot chase: down the street, through an alleyway, over three fences. Several times along the way, the officer would catch up to the man briefly and engage in a physical struggle, but the man kept slipping away. After they’d leaped over the third fence, they ended up in a backyard barn stall, left over from a bygone era when residents owned horses. There they had a final fistfight, toe-to-toe and down in the dirt. The brawl, said a witness who saw it from her porch, was a pretty hellacious dustup. When the officer finally got the man under control and tried to handcuff him, the suspect grabbed the cuffs from the officer’s hand and began swinging at him with the metal rings and kicking him in the chest. The officer, both exhausted from the foot chase in the heat and beaten down by the cuffs, would later tell us that he could not catch his breath and was about to pass out. “You’re going to have to kill me!” the man yelled, according to the cop. The officer, in fear for his life, then pulled his gun and shot the suspect, killing him.
I was on vacation, just getting out of a pool, when a member of my command staff called me with the news. “Chief, we had an officer-involved shooting,” he said, and rattled off most of the details, assuring me the situation was under control.
“What was the race of the suspect?” I asked.
“Black,” he told me.
“And what was the race of the officer?” I asked.
“White.”
“I’m coming to work,” I told him. He tried to dissuade me, but I insisted. This was Dixon Circle we were talking about—a neighborhood with a history of heated reactions in the face of racially charged incidents. It was one of the few areas in Dallas where residents had protested during the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
At headquarters, as my team raced in and out of my office with updates, I turned on the television. Hundreds of Dixon Circle residents had already gathered in the streets. Newscasters and reporters, still trying to sort out what had happened, reported the main rumor that was circulating: A white officer had shot an unarmed black man in the back while he was running away. On television and social media, the speculation—in place of any facts—was taking root. I knew I needed an aggressive communications and investigative strategy if we were to have any chance of keeping the city calm.
I didn’t know it at first, but the drug dealer in question was a kind of Robin Hood around this area: He handed out turkeys to residents at Thanksgiving and bought presents for children at Christmas. He’d also been a popular athlete at the local high school, and he had a large family and many friends living in the area. So when word hit the street that this man was the victim, what might’ve ordinarily been an impassioned response was shaping up to be explosive.
I fast-tracked our investigations. Under normal circumstances, it can take several weeks for a medical examiner to determine a bullet’s trajectory: exactly how and where it entered and exited the victim’s body. I did not have the luxury of waiting that long. “I want the medical examiner to get out there right now and look at the body,” I ordered. I wanted detectives and senior leadership on the scene to observe the body and form their opinions about the case. “And get me a full pre-briefing of every piece of evidence you can find,” I added. I then dispersed our full team of special investigators and key commanders to the location.
There they canvassed every inch of the scene—the home, as well as the barn stall and its surrounding areas—and identified and interviewed witnesses. That process typically takes two weeks; I wanted it done in two hours. Most newscasters had already broken in to their six p.m. programs with preliminary reports of the shooting, many based on the emotional accounts of loved ones and neighborhood friends who hadn’t actually witnessed the skirmish. Before their ten p.m. broadcasts, I planned to be ready with some facts.
And that meant I had to take a calculated risk. Fast-tracking an investigation and going public with the findings left a good chance for the facts to change later. Most criminal investigations are fluid and constantly shifting, especially during the first few days. The full picture comes into focus only gradually, as the full set of facts emerge through disciplined police work. But as chief, I had to weigh the risks against the benefits in every situation, and in this case, I concluded that offering some information, even if incomplete, was preferable to having the press fill the vacuum with the only thing that existed at that point: uncorroborated reports. We’d simply have to preface our information with a disclaimer: “This is what we know right now, but the situation may change.” We trusted that the public would understand that.
At the scene, my officers interviewed a credible witness, the elderly woman who saw the fistfight from start to end; the barn stall was in her backyard. She said the officer had shot the man as the suspect was beating the cop down—not in the back as the dealer was running away, which had been the rumor.
As my team gathered additional eyewitness accounts, the dispatch team and I carefully examined the taped 911 call for any clues. We were able to pinpoint the location from which the cell call had been made—another part of Dixon Circle—but we could not confirm the caller’s identity. “Whose cellphone is it?” I asked. Our investigators were already on it. One of the few providers that does not require its applicants to show ID or give a real name when they purchase a phone had sold the phone. As far as it’s concerned, you can call yourself Daffy Duck as long as your money’s good. And sure enough, this phone was under a phony name. Dead end—until we found the next way to search.
When the phone was purchased, a security camera at the store had captured the whole transaction. After combing that tape, we found an image of the person who’d bought the phone. It was clear enough for us to identify the man: a known drug dealer in Dixon Circle. By pinging the cell’s exact location, our investigators found him, and within three hours of the shooting, we took him into custody and began grilling him. His confession was full-throated and unequivocal: He, a rival drug dealer to the man who’d been shot, had made the bogus 911 call. He’d done so, he said, in retaliation. In a dispute he’d had with the deceased man some weeks prior, he had been beaten down pretty bad. The call had been his slick way of getting the man arrested. He admitted all this on tape.
Meanwhile the protesters—galvanized by the gossip that this dealer had been shot in the back, in cold blood, by a white cop—quadrupled in number. Their anger seemed to intensify by the hour, stoked by the flames of the false account. There they were, ready to burn down Dallas, based on half-truths and innuendo. Though we were still investigating, I wanted to release the evidence we’d uncovered as soon as possible—on the air as well as on our blog and Facebook page. I had to get out in front of this story before the lie fully took hold—before it reached the point where the truth no longer matters to many people. Like it or not, in the age of Twitter and smartphone news, the public often makes up its mind based on initial reports, even if those reports are erroneous. That’s not fair, but it’s reality, particularly in these times teeming with highly visible accounts of black citizens killed by white cops. We did not yet have all the facts—I was still awaiting conclusive evidence from the medical examiner—but we had better information than anyone else. If I waited two weeks to speak up, the city might be burned down by then.
I held a live press conference. During the briefing and Q&A, I did not hold back on the details: I gave the full names of the suspect and cop and a scene-by-scene account of the incident, based on eyewitness interviews. I revealed that the suspect did not have a gun. I also shared that the bogus 911 call had come from a dealer who’d been in a feud with the man who’d been shot. “We have as evidence crack cocaine in the house, in the front yard, and on the side of the house,” I stated. I also explained that, contrary to the caller’s claim, no Latino males had been seen in the house.
When a reporter in the press pool asked me whether the suspect had been shot in the back, I answered prudently but forthrightly. “Our preliminary belief is that he was shot in the stomach area,” I said. “But that’s very preliminary. The actual person who rules on where he was shot is the medical examiner. We have to be very careful in determining entrance and exit wounds.” Those wounds, as I’d learned during my time as a crime scene investigator, can appear remarkably similar. “We will continue to pursue the facts,” I said. “The reason I’m doing the press conference is so that we can make sure that the neighborhood hears from the chief of police that I’ve been briefed on the facts, and I will continue to release information as we find out what’s happened out there.” I released the exact same information on all our social media platforms.
The residents of Dixon Circle apparently got my message. A short time after that press conference, the crowd disbanded on its own. Not a single person was injured; nor was there any damage to property. Our swift response and absolute transparency had prevented a riot—one that might have become like the violent protests to rock Ferguson, Missouri, two summers later after a white officer fatally shot Michael Brown, a nineteen-year-old black man.
In the aftermath of the incident, the lessons abounded—and so did the tactics I used to prevent such situations from arising in the first place. I increased our community efforts in every regard: more de-escalation training for my officers, more policies regarding when officers could chase suspects, and more overall transparency, as I posted all available information on the city’s police-involved shootings. It was no longer just a matter of me wanting to be more forthright with the public. In a rapidly changing world where mayhem could be incited with a single falsehood, it had become a necessity. At a time when truth itself is under attack, our democracy depends on transparency—and so does every police force in the nation. And as we seek and find the truth, we must have the courage to stand up for it—not just when our officers show great bravery but especially when they make mistakes that disappoint us.
The Dixon Circle incident sparked a spirited internal debate among the officers in our department. As the situation unfolded, some of the old-school commanders hadn’t agreed with my choice to release incomplete evidence. But in the absence of answers, even partial ones, who fills the void? The press does, and their reporting can be shaded by information provided by those who may have hidden agendas. Our society has an insatiable appetite for both information and misinformation, and even if those reporting do not have confirmed details, I’ve seen many willing to rush a story out just so they could be among the first with a scoop. To challenge this, police departments have to be forthcoming with what we do know, while admitting that the story may change. Better for a chief to talk than some knucklehead who has witnessed nothing.
The coming years would see a sharp uptick in the visibility of unarmed black men killed by cops, with massive protests erupting in response: Michael Brown in Ferguson, 2014. Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Walter Scott in North Charleston, 2015. Philando Castile in Saint Paul, Minnesota, 2016. And the list goes on. Each time I heard about an incident, I remembered Dixon—with gratitude that Dallas had been spared. And thank heavens that we didn’t just have a near miss and move on, patting ourselves on the back that we’d done a good job in fending off a riot. We used the experience to reinforce our strong belief that holding ourselves and one another to the highest standard of accountability is our duty, our obligation to the public.
Yet I’m as aware now as I’ve always been that no amount of training or accountability can remove officers’ flaws and frailties. Humans—all humans, and especially police officers—make mistakes. They must often make split-second decisions in order to save lives, including their own. Still, when mistakes are made—the kind that clearly violate law enforcement protocol and endanger the public—police supervisors must have enough integrity and courage to identify and let go of the few who should not remain in our profession. Such courage and principle are necessary ingredients in maintaining an excellent force.
IN TODAY’S RACIALLY AND POLITICALLY charged climate, I often hear a particular question: Are white cops unfairly targeting and killing black citizens? Reporters, residents, colleagues, and friends have posed that question to me more times than I can count, and understandably so. In my view, the question, though usually well-intentioned, is divisive. No matter what answer I give—whether it’s Yes, I believe people of color are unfairly attacked, or No, I don’t think they are—I will alienate a large percentage of the very groups that desperately need to come together. The way that question is framed is one major reason we remain divided, and the same is true about a question I hear from officers: Is there an organized community effort to ambush and kill cops? In both cases, attempting a response will only lead you down a rabbit hole. It’s not that we need to stop asking questions—it’s that we need to pose more thoughtful ones.
When someone wonders aloud whether racist cops are targeting unarmed black men, they’ve skipped over mountains and mountains of issues to get to that one. In many urban centers where people of color reside, some of the greatest problems are failing schools. Waning or nonexistent mental health and drug treatment resources. An endless cycle of generational poverty. Disenfranchisement. None of those are policing problems. Rather than singling out the community’s relationship with law enforcement, I think we’d do far more good by asking the kinds of questions that can lead to solutions. For example: How can we turn community protesting into actionable change? How can we deliver results that significantly improve the quality of life for residents in all neighborhoods, including the most impoverished ones? Those are questions and conversations that matter.
Examining particular cases of police-involved shootings can be a productive part of that larger discussion, as long as we don’t use the specifics to claim unproven generalities. If you ask me, for instance, whether an officer should shoot an unarmed man in the back while he is fleeing, I will tell you no. I will also tell you that if he or she does, that officer should be fired, based on the policies in place in law enforcement. I will also tell you that the cop should subsequently stand trial. What I won’t tell you is what the outcome of that trial should be, since in our system of government, a judge and jury have the authority to make that determination. Nor would I render the lessons or outcomes of that case universal by concluding that all cops are racist. Each situation is to be judged on its own merits, and for every ten examples in which a cop has been in the wrong—and without question, there have been many—there are ten other cases where the officer was doing his or her job by the book. Which of these instances should define a profession as racist or not racist? No one likes being stereotyped, not African-Americans and not cops. And here’s a more important question: What inquiries should drive and frame our society’s collective discussion on improving our cities and reaching across racial lines?
The answers are complex and nuanced. They cannot be boiled down to a ten-second sound bite, a seven-word headline, or a 140-character tweet, though that is exactly what the public has been trained to expect and what the media often goes in search of. These short answers are costing us. They are further pushing us into our separate corners. The longer answers—the ones I want to spend my energy on—can actually lead us to a better place. They can bring about viable antidotes for societal ills that our law enforcement officials—civil servants who earn an average of $60,000 a year—were never meant to address, such as mental illness.
It’s a fact now acknowledged by many that imprisoning hundreds of thousands of drug offenders and other criminals during the mass incarceration of the 1980s and ’90s was not an overall winning strategy for reducing crime—and many of those I imprisoned struggled with mental illness (more than 40 percent of federal prisoners are mentally ill). Once paroled, they’d return to the same street corners and apartment buildings and kept right on doing what got them locked up in the first place. Or if they tried to turn their lives around by finding meaningful work or by entering a drug treatment program, they found it impossible to get hired with a record, and they found drug treatment resources scarce, particularly in the most impoverished communities. Most did exactly what makes sense in the world of an addict, a dealer, or a mentally ill person: They went back to selling or using, sometimes both.
With the loss of my son, the issues of mental illness, drug use, and gun violence became personal for me. Why is someone with a mental illness allowed to purchase a gun? How did my son even get a gun? I didn’t give it to him. The only gun I kept in my house was the one issued by the department, and I did not carry it when I was off duty. I know barrels of ink have been devoted to the topic of introducing legislation that keeps guns out of the hands of mentally ill people; I also know that powerful lobbies and political forces have often brought us to an impasse. But wherever any of us stands on the topic of gun ownership and our Second Amendment right to bear arms as American citizens, I hope we can at least come together and agree on this: We need to close the legal loopholes in federal background checks that allow mentally disturbed individuals to purchase guns.
Knowing what I do now, rather than becoming an officer, I might have chosen to become a drug treatment counselor. Incidentally, I could have also studied to become a mental health professional, an early childhood educator, or a policy maker who fights for increased mental health and drug treatment funding. Policing is the back end of the equation. Police are called in when it’s time to play cleanup, when an arrest must be made or a terrible situation resolved. But police cannot address what I see as one of the most significant issues in our inner cities: the demand for drugs.
When I first joined the force, I thought it was about supply—and to the extent that you could curtail that supply, I reasoned, you could restore some order. That is not entirely untrue, but that approach does not do anything to address the demand for illegal substances. The drug dealers exist only because their customers keep buying. What first drives people to experiment with drugs, and why do they keep returning? Aside from basic physical addiction, they keep coming back because, on some level, the drugs are working for them. They are meeting a need. They are blunting a pain that feels too overwhelming to contend with. Or they are medicating a mental illness that, in a world that still stigmatizes mental illness, has gone undiagnosed. There are as many other reasons and factors as there are people. When we help our family members, our friends, and our relatives cope with the extraordinary forces that compel them to use, we simultaneously keep our communities safer.
When it comes to drug use and mental health, as well as any of the other problems that plague parts of our country, we don’t have all the solutions. In place of answers, it’s understandably easy to blame those in the spotlight: cops caught on camera. When officers don’t do their jobs, they should face consequences. When they use excessive force on anyone of any racial background, they should be dismissed from the ranks. When their actions have seemingly been driven by racial bias rather than by fear for their lives, they have no place in any department. I know I stand with the thousands of officers in my profession who will always condemn that behavior. And yet as indefensible and horrifying as such behavior is, it’s not the source of the ills that afflict urban communities. It’s only a symptom.
I do not pretend to know everything about these issues. I’m aware that I have enormous blind spots—that I don’t know what I don’t know. And yes, there are many things I’ve done and said that I wish I could do over, such as participating in the mass incarceration of thousands of urban youth earlier in my career. But from where I stand now, I do know far more than I did when I started out on this journey more than three decades ago. And from my place at the intersection of three communities—as an inner-city kid; as a black man, husband, and father; and as an officer who has risked my life alongside scores of honorable cops of all races and ethnicities—I am clear about one thing. We will make progress only when we set aside our assumptions and really start listening to each other—now more than ever.
YOU WOULD THINK A PLUNGING crime rate would always be good news—and overall it is. During my first five years as chief of the Dallas Police Department—2010 to 2015—crime didn’t just spiral downward. Our CompStat data graphs showed that it fell off the cliff. When I requested a study to examine the source of the decline, the results demonstrated that community policing had been the driving force. Though we were still far from the safest big city in the country, we’d moved up from last to within the top five by 2015. Our crime rates had fallen to the lowest levels in fifty years.
That came at a price. During every single one of those years, I’d proposed a budget to the city manager, the mayor and city council members, and the budget director. As crime fell in the wake of our community policing efforts, it became apparent that I could manage the department’s $400 million-plus budget with a certain number of officers—in 2010, that was nearly 3,700 cops. From a city management perspective, it was smart to redirect the dollars we might have spent on hiring even more cops instead on expanding library resources and hours, as well as parks and recreation programs. That also made sense from a law enforcement perspective, because every child who’s in a library or rec center after school is potentially one fewer child who falls into crime. So I actually advocated for those funds to be redirected.
But the situation began changing in 2015. I was losing officers, many of whom left for higher salaries in the suburbs. I had maximized the number of officers I could assign to hot spots and community policing posts; there always needs to be a certain number of cops whose job it is to answer 911 calls. By 2015, I’d lost more than three hundred officers. Community policing had made us safer for five years in a row—but near the end of that five years, I noticed an uptick. And I knew it had everything to do with the fact that I was hemorrhaging staff.
“We can’t make this happen without more cops,” I pleaded to the mayor and the city council and city manager’s office. “We won’t have enough resources for the next twelve months.” They heard me. But given that I’d somehow pulled it off for five years in a row, I had very little budget leverage. It was a tough case to make—and apparently, I did not make it strongly or convincingly enough. The fact that I could not persuade the team to allocate more money to staffing would come at a high cost—to the department, to the city at large, and to me professionally.