A rattling of bones

Star-Telegram

It looks like some terrible skeletons are coming out of the closet at the North Richland Hills Police Department.

Some of them are unproven allegations and thus may be only figments of someone's imagination. Still, there's plenty to worry about.

Much of the trouble revolves around the department's SWAT team. Some involves the police chief and his own past problems.

Short of personnel housecleaning -- which may not be justified unless allegations are proven -- there is little that can be done right now other than to make sure that the people and procedures are in place to keep such problems from coming up again.

City officials are quick to say that allegations in two lawsuits involving the SWAT team are not related. In terms of the reputations of the city and its police, they not only are related but are joined at the hip.

When SWAT team members burst into Della Venne's house without knocking in April 1999, they had a warrant to search for her son and LSD. They found neither.

Venne said in a lawsuit that officers searched her, forcing her to expose her breasts as part of that search. The city has paid more than $50,000 to settle that suit.

The city admitted no wrongdoing, but it will have a very hard time shaking the popular perception that when a lawsuit is over, the guilty party pays.

When the SWAT team raided Barbara Davis' house without knocking in December 1999, they were looking for her son and marijuana. They fatally shot her son, saying that he pointed a gun at them. They found no marijuana in the house itself -- only three dying plants in the back yard.

How can these two cases not be seen as painting an image any brighter than that of a bunch of cowboy cops run amok? Add to that the fact that the SWAT team shooter in the Davis case bared his penis for a team photograph about a year earlier, and the image grows even darker.

Police Chief Tom Shockley enters the scene not only as the man at the top when all of this happened, but also with his own checkered past. As a police officer, he was indicted once after firing his pistol into a teen-ager's car (a charge later expunged from his record) and was placed on disciplinary probation once for firing his weapon without cause.

In light of those incidents, he could be seen either as the cowboys' trail boss or as the leader who knows from personal experience about actions that are wrong and who can better know how to control his troops.

All this puts North Richland Hills in a bad light. The city's administrators and its elected officials must take that very seriously.

As they work their way through the various allegations against the Police Department, they also must focus on making sure that no further mistakes are made.

Police departments must be ruled by strong leaders who enforce strong discipline. No-knock warrants should be rare, issued on solid evidence and only in major felony cases that are serious enough to call for such an invasion.

The leaders of North Richland Hills must make sure that their Police Department has strong leaders and strong policies. Then they can set about repairing the damage that has been done to their city's reputation.

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