Ft. Worth (WBAP/KLIF News) – After almost a year since becoming Fort Worth’s police chief, Joel Fitzgerald has laid out several priorities for the city’s police force.
Fitzgerald has emphasized “community policing” to help people of a given neighborhood establish relationships with officers working the same beat each day.
“These neighborhood investment strategies as a whole are going to be real tenets of what we do in the future,” Fitzgerald says.
Fitzgerald says increased professionalism and community involvement will lead to fewer incidents where police use force.
A proposed bond package in 2018 will ask for funding to build two more police locations in the fastest growing parts of Ft. Worth. As more people move in to the western and southern parts of the city, the department will need to establish a presence.
“We have to have that infrastructure in place,” Fitzgerald says. “Not in the form of rentals or in the form of leased space, but in the form of real, hard infrastructure.”
Fitzgerald says Ft. Worth also trails similarly sized cities in the number of officers per capita. Ft. Worth is the 16th largest city in the country and has 1.9 police officers per 1,000 residents. Columbus, Ohio is 15th largest; Charlotte, North Carolina is 17th largest. Both cities have 2.2 officers.
Earlier this year, Ft. Worth police held seven meetings across the city. Fitzgerald says hundreds of people submitted comments. He says people in neighborhoods with higher crime have expressed an interest in working with police to become safer.
On Friday, Ft. Worth reopened a store front in the Caville neighborhood.
“We’re sort of the Swiss army knife of social services,” Fitzgerald says. “When we embed ourselves in a community, people who don’t necessarily have all the alternatives at hand, we can sometimes bridge that gap.”
The city says crime in Fort Worth has dropped 2.4% in the past year.
(Copyright 2016 WBAP/KLIF News. All rights reserved)
