On the road
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
September 2015 Dallas Police Shield
In December, 1945 Chief Carl Hansson was still giving
interviews about his prediction of an increase in crime in Dallas with the end
of WWII with the de-mobilization of military personnel coming home from the war.
The city had already experienced thousands of ex-servicemen coming to Dallas to
look for jobs. After the war, there started a movement nationwide of people
moving from rural settings to the cities. Dallas was no exception and was
already experiencing a housing shortage at the end of 1945.
In many
neighborhoods, homeowners began taking advantage of this and started taking in
renters. In many cases large homes in largely well-established neighborhoods were
chopped up to make apartments to make way for the large influx of former
servicemen. In some cases (such as old East Dallas) this led to a post-war decline
in the integrity of the neighborhoods when the servicemen and their families began
moving on and purchasing homes of their own, leaving the chopped up homes behind. There was a movement
in the 1970’s (that continues today) to save these homes and neighborhoods and
has been successful in many cases.
Chief Hansson told reporters that another police academy
class would be graduating before the end of the year bringing the department up
to almost pre-war levels. He went on to say that this still wouldn’t be enough
since Dallas will be a completely different city than it was before the war.
The training program will continue he said.
The chief also went on to say that he needs more squad cars
in radio patrol. “The quality of our cars is down considerably due to the hard
service they’ve been put through during the war years. Although as a police
department we have some priority advantages, getting replacement parts and good
tires has been a problem. This situation should get better soon. We have fifteen
motorcycles on order to strengthen the four that we already have along with the
three-wheeled motorcycles in the fleet”.
In other news the DMN reported that 106 S. Harwood was
bursting at the seams. The article said that the City is already leasing two
nearby buildings for the overflow of workers at City Hall.
The report mentioned that when 106 was built in 1914, there
were around 135,000 citizens in Dallas. In late 1945, there were approximately
400,000 and growing. The report said by the year 1970 there will be
approximately 750,000 people living in the city. Also in recent years the
Dallas area had almost doubled by annexation. The citizens of Dallas would soon
vote on a bond election of $ 2,500,000 for a new city hall and $40,000,000
ten-year plan on December 8th.
The Dallas City Council had toured 106 recently and were shocked
as how the police department was crowded into the basement and sub-basement without
room to expand. One council member, M.M. Straus said that he was glad that
there were no visitors along with the tour, “This is a disgrace to the City he
said”.
The police locker and recreation room in the subbasement is located
among leaking water pipes, is poorly lighted and ventilated it was observed.
This writer can testify that by 1977, not much had changed.
During the tour, the council observed that the police
identification bureau is jammed. Every filing cabinet is full and no place for
new filing cabinets. The crime prevention bureau has been moved out of the
basement to the barn-like former central fire station on Main Street.
The jail is inadequate for a city the size of Dallas. The
council was told that on any Saturday night all of the jail cells were full to
overcrowding and the ‘bull pen’ was also overflowing. Again in 1977, it was
still the same!
The plan called for a new municipal building to be built next
to 106 S. Harwood (it was). The present 106 would be totally turned over to the
police department and corporation courts (it…largely was).
In the early seventies there was a call to build a new city
hall to be built on a site that had once had a large hotel located on it on Young
Street. There was the usual outcry of the tax money being spent on such a large
building designed by a world renowned architect who had for instance designed
structures at JFK airport in New York City.
The new city hall was built of course and is an admittedly pretty
cool looking building to this day. One would wonder where we would be if the
City of Dallas were still crammed into 106 S. Harwood and 2014 Main Street.
Friday, August 7, 2015
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Friday, July 17, 2015
August 2015 Dallas Police Shield
In December, 1945 the first IACP (International Association
of Chiefs of Police) was held (of course) in Miami, Florida. DPD Chief Carl
Hansson was there and met with local, state and federal law enforcement
officials. Hansson told reporters that he took lots of notes and has a lot of
new ideas on how to make the DPD far ahead of all other southern police
departments and equal to the best everywhere.
Hansson went on to say that many of the ideas and
improvements that he had been contemplating were sanctioned by international
experts. He said that he planned on bringing every bureau of the department up
to the minute in equipment and personnel. The Chief went on to say that the DPD
is already ahead of many police departments in the areas of juvenile
delinquency, traffic enforcement and robberies.
During the conference, speakers such as Attorney General Tom
Clark and J. Edgar Hoover as well as local police executives blasted police
departments in what was termed as “disgraceful pay scales.” According to the
Dallas Morning News, nearly every speaker spoke along the lines of the
importance of getting the public to see that police officers are not strange,
brawny creatures (?) but are friends and neighbors who are designated to
enforce laws the laws that the public asked for.
Hansson also said that he would be interested in seeing
Dallas officers receive better pay. After his arrival back in Dallas he would
talk with the city Manager about the subject.
Along the subject of better pay for its police officers,
Mayor Woodall Rodgers addressed the second class to be graduated from the ‘police
training school’ at a luncheon at the Italian Village restaurant. He said that
that Dallas should attempt to set the high standards that had been set by the FBI.
“The FBI has demonstrated it pays to get high-caliber men and pay them well,”
Rodgers said. “The FBI requires college graduates and starts them at $250. It
is a bargain.”
The Mayor went on to say that “I believe in a well- paid
police department and I look forward to the day when we can increase base pay
for DPD officers from $180 to $250 per month. I feel that the temporary bonuses
paid during the war should be made permanent in view of the high cost of living
and the high standards required of applicants for police jobs.”
The Mayor also said that the Chief of police in Dallas
should be paid $7000 a year instead of the current $5,600 up from $5000 a year
since the start of WWII.
Chief Hansson later in the month of December spoke of the
need of the Dallas Police Department to be expanded as rapidly as possible. He foresees
a rapid postwar rise in crime in the city. Hansson said that the current number
of DPD officers, 354, is not adequate to meet the needs of the city.
The Chief told the DMN that the crime wave is already here
with the month of November experiencing 256 burglaries for instance. “So far Dallas has escaped the waves of
murders being experienced in cities such as Detroit, New York City and other
cities, but they probably will come. We
can’t build the department overnight. All we can do is assimilate only about 25
new men every six weeks because they must be schooled in police training and
then be broken in on the job by experienced officers.”
In other news Dallas
police were investigating a disappearance of a Denver, Colorado woman
reportedly cremated in Dallas in 1936. Captain Will Fritz said that the
circumstances are similar to the 1944 death and cremation of a woman who suspect
Alfred Cline was charged with murdering.
The Denver woman was a Mrs. Maud Walters who was a wealthy
Denver socialite who remarried, withdrew money from a bank and was reported to
have been killed in a car accident in Dallas In September, 1936.
Captain Fritz said that the DPD and DPS show no such traffic
death for the month mentioned. The woman’s relatives became suspicious after being
notified by her husband that she had been cremated “at her own request.” None
of the relatives had ever met the husband and were not notified of the funeral
until after it happened.
Mrs. Walters died with all of her wealth going to her new
husband according to the relatives of the woman.
Captain Fritz said that there were no crematorium facilities
in Dallas in 1936 and said he will contact a San Antonio facility and have them
check their records.
The suspect in the 1944 murder, Alfred Cline, is a 56 year
old ex-convict who is charged with the murder of Mrs. Alice Carpenter who was
cremated in October, 1944 after her death in a local hotel, apparently of
natural causes according to initial reports.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Monday, June 1, 2015
Monday, May 25, 2015
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
June 2015 Dallas Police Shield
On May 26, 1968 there was an article in the Dallas Morning
News written by James Ewell, a well liked and respected DMN police beat writer.
As a young rookie in 1977-78 I remember seeing him with the white Stetson hat
that all the detectives wore regularly at 106 S. Harwood. I always thought that
he was a DPD detective.
On this day he wrote about Officer Jerry North, a supervisor
in the DPD records unit. For some time, Jerry had been collecting artifacts
from DPD history from different back rooms, closets and the attic of 106 after
finding many items stored in a seldom used storage room behind the jails maximum
security blocks on the fifth floor in 1962. North told Ewell that decay had
already taken place and the artifacts must have been placed there many years
prior. To North, these were priceless artifacts that belonged to a bygone era
of the Dallas Police Department. He believed that they should be preserved and
exhibited in a safe and proper manner.
North apparently took it upon himself to try and preserve
many of the artifacts including polishing many of the brass items such as
plaques and trophies won by the department’s pistol teams. He also said that
there are stacks and stacks of departmental records that were damp and falling
apart from the moisture in that storage room. One of the most valued mementoes
is the last portrait made of the entire Dallas Police Department. It sits in a
frame 10 feet long and 5 feet wide. The picture was made for the 1936 Texas
Centennial at Fair Park. The image was taken in front of the Scottish Rite
Cathedral which still stands to this day.
North’s boss in 1968, Chief Charles Batchelor could be seen
as a young rookie in the back row of the portrait. Ewell writes that North
believes that the records and historic artifacts could only be saved by the
creation of a DPD police museum.
The excuse in 1968 was the same that it had been for many
years before and since. There was no money and no room outside of the jail to
display the items.
We actually owe a lot to Jerry North. If not for him and
others, including the unknown persons who had the forethought to gather and
house the artifacts in that original storeroom in the first place prior to
North finding them, we may not have anything that points to our early history.
Sadly Jerry North passed away in 2014.
In the late 1970’s a civilian who worked in the
quartermaster unit took it upon himself to gather these items once again. He
thought that the area that he worked would be an ideal place to display DPD
history. This effort failed.
A more organized effort happened in the 1980’s when a DPD
retiree, Dennis Dozier and several others formed a committee to explore the
idea of having the artifacts moved and displayed at 2014 Main Street. After
several stops and starts, this failed as well. Space and funding seemed to be
the major obstacles as had been the case before.
One thing that we should be thankful for however is that the
“Dozier Committee” had the foresight to ask the Dallas Public Library to store
the by now hundreds of departmental and personal pieces of DPD history.
The library did agree to store them in a secure and dry place
to wait for a time when they could be displayed properly.
In 2001, plans for the new Headquarters Building were in
full swing. Jess Lucio approached Chief Greg Holliday, who was project liaison
for the new building, to ask if a space could be reserved for a police museum.
Chief Bolton was asked about the idea and he agreed that a place was needed in
the new building.
Jess Lucio was then asked by Chief Holliday to transfer to
Special Projects to begin the archiving of what the department already had, and
advertise for additional historic artifacts to be donated or put on loan to the
future museum. Many of the items that had been stored at the library were
transferred to the new building on Lamar Street after it was completed. Jess has been a great steward of the
department’s acquisitions and should be thanked for this effort!
Soon a DPD museum board of directors was established. The
first chairman was the late Murphy Martin who was a well- known television and
radio personality in Dallas. This first board worked hard and convinced the
department to officially designate the museum space in the building as such and
that nothing else could ever occupy that area.
The first board of directors thankfully accomplished this
task and now that space on the second floor is where the museum will be
located.
When Jess Lucio retired in 2013, Senior Corporal Rick Janich
took over as museum curator. So we now had hundreds if not thousands of
historic artifacts ready to be displayed. Rick tells me that some of the most
recent and now permanently displayed large artifacts in the headquarters building include
a DPD helicopter, police car, a Harley-Davidson Servi-car and a Kawasaki police
bike, all of which actually served the citizens of Dallas. One of the first
Harley-Davidson police bikes (2006) that took the place of the Kawasaki’s during
the transition will also be displayed soon.
Many rare and historic smaller items are stored and are now
ready to be shown to the public for the first time. These include Chief Elmo
Straight’s (Straight Lane?) gold badge and revolver. Probably one of the most
interesting is Captain Will Fritz’s Thompson sub-machine gun. There is also
another Thompson that was found in a landfill, actually in pretty good
condition!
These and many, many other personal and professional items
from police officer’s families have been donated or put on loan for the
museum’s use.
The current museum board of directors include current police
officers including two chiefs as well as retiree’s. Recently Chief Brown agreed and signed off on
the plans for a media center on the second floor of the headquarters building
where citizens could learn about the history of the Dallas Police Department.
There are also plans to safely and securely display the 10’x5’ picture of the
department from 1936 previously mentioned that thankfully has survived all
these years!
As we all know, tradition and its history are two things
that police departments all over the world can point at with pride. I like many
of you have had the opportunity to visit many police museums and have always
been somewhat surprised and dismayed that we, as a large department with such a
rich history, have never had a proper museum to house and display artifacts.
Even small and medium sized police
artments have found a way to fund such museums. Even our
Dallas fire Department has had a fine museum for years at Fair Park.
As before, our major problem now is not space, or lack of
historic artifacts, or even lack of trying. It’s funding! Chief Brown is
committed to having the museum become a reality in the next few years. There
are plans in the works that will make this a reality. Let’s all do what we can
to help in this endeavor!
Monday, May 11, 2015
Monday, May 4, 2015
Saturday, April 25, 2015
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
May 2015 Dallas Police Shield
World War II had officially been over since September, 1945.
There were still millions of servicemen and women still overseas and in the
states however so the pool of Dallas Police applicants was not significant and
it was hard even finding prospective recruits to even sit for a civil service
test apparently.
On October 4, 1946 the Dallas Morning News wrote that there
were currently 90 vacancies on the department but only 68 applicants showed up
that Thursday night to take the test. If averages held true according to E.M.
Powell, civil service board secretary, it would mean that only 22 or 23 of the
test takers would pass both the civil service examination and the stiff
physical examination. He also said that it would be necessary to call another
test in three or four weeks.
City Manager V.R. Smitham said that the City of Dallas would
continue its strict requirements rather than lower standards to attract
prospective candidates. He went on to say that “We would rather have 12 good men
than 3 times as many mediocre candidates.”
I remember that there were times while in Tactical (now
SWAT) in the 80’s and 90’s that we were sent to an area to “saturate” a
geographical part of the city because of a burglar, hijacker or whatever was operating
in an attempt to catch him or her or to at least push that bad guy to leave the
location, and hopefully go to the suburbs… not really but you get my drift.
Some of the best
times were Sunday’s when a burglar would be pin pointing an apartment complex say…in
The Village. Fighting crime while driving around and around those apartments (burglars
were known to frequent the pool areas) with my squad-mates on those Sunday afternoons
are among some of my best memories. I doubt if it’s still that way, times have
changed and Dallas will arguably never see the freewheeling post disco New Wave
80’s and the edgy 90’s again. We did catch some burglars however!
On October 12, 1946
there had been numerous complaints about Dallas police cars patrolling the Southern
Methodist University campus. What?? DPD squad cars at SMU? Couldn’t happen.
The reason behind the “ I have nothing better to do than complain
about DPD cars driving around my neighborhood” according to University Park
Mayor H. E. Yarbrough is that U.P.’s squad cars had the new black and white
color scheme like DPD squad cars had as their paint schemes as well for years.
He pointed out that the difference was that U.P. cars had a gold shield on the
side (of course) and their cars didn’t have “Police” in large letters on the
rear of the squad cars. The new black
and white paint scheme will be put on all U.P.P.D. cars except detectives and
the chief’s car.
Mayor Yarbrough said that the change from all black to black
and white was made because U.P. commissioners felt that laws would be better obeyed
if people knew that police were around. “The all-black cars looked just like
any other private car,” he said.
Whew! It’s a good thing that we weren’t worried about the
threat of the Russians having the A-Bomb yet and Dallas being vaporized…but
just wait a year or so!
In other more important news Dallas liquor store operators
will pool their strength in an attempt to find a suspect in a recent rash of liquor
store robbery-shootings where two clerks had been killed.
Julius Shepps, a well known and respected liquor wholesaler
called for a meeting at the Mercantile Bank building of area liquor store
owners and suggested an award for the arrest and capture of the suspect. Some
store owners had already hired security officers to combat the killing and
robbing spree. Other owners are closing earlier than usual as another solution.
The robbery suspect was described as being “nervous”
according to one clerk who survived being shot. Stores had been robbed at such
locations as Latimer St. , North Pearl near Cochran St. and Cedar Springs at
Alamo.
DPD Chief of Detectives Will Fritz said that the DPD is redoubling
its efforts in the search for the killer after Joe Enna was shot at 1715 Latimer
and was in serious condition at St. Paul hospital.
One liquor store owner suggested closing as early as 7 P.M.
Lastly we find that on October 24th the DMN
reported that three juveniles ages 15, 16 and (17?) were participants in a scam
where they passed themselves off as working for the “Blank” detective agency.”
An Oak Cliff women whose 16 year old daughter was missing
called police when one of the trio came to her home and said that his agency
would search for her daughter for a fee of $25.00. The women became suspicious
and called Crime Prevention Inspector J. W. Welch. The woman was told to invite
the P.I. in training to her home which she did. The “juvenile” was described as
a 17 year old (not sure if 17 was considered an adult in 1946) who came to the
front door with a lengthy “contract” for the woman to sign. “I represent the “Blank”
detective agency,” he said, naming a fictitious company.
Officers Ed Hicks and J. C. Peterson were waiting down the
street when the juvenile arrived. Hicks removed his coat and tie and went to
the house and then becoming a distraught relative.
The 17 year old talked to Hicks and outlined the “services”
that his company would provide to the family in an attempt to find the woman’s
missing child. Hicks then told him that he was as a Dallas Police officer. The
17 year old was arrested.
Friday, April 17, 2015
Thursday, April 9, 2015
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Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Monday, March 30, 2015
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