Three finalists for Lewisville’s next police chief made their debut Wednesday night to discuss their visions for the department.
Christy Martinez, Brook Rollins and William Wawro answered different sets of questions about their leadership styles in front of Lewisville residents, Police Department members and city staff.
The candidates, listed alphabetically, and a few of their responses are listed below. Their responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Christy Martinez
It’s no secret that policing in America is experiencing one of the more challenging times over the past few decades. What will you do to ensure that Lewisville residents and business owners continue to support their Police Department?
The community and police department, they work hand in hand. It’s no secret that when communities thrive, you usually have a thriving police department and vice versa. A thriving police department equals a thriving community. It’s very imperative that we build and encourage these relationships.
As an assistant chief of the Grand Prairie Police Department, we were fortunate to have quarterly meetings with all of our community leaders, clergy, pastors. During those discussions, we were able to talk about difficult subjects and start bridging the gap when unrest happened. Because we have to build those relationships well ahead of time. Our faith-based leaders and community leaders, they say, “Grand Prairie, we’ve seen you time and time again. We know how your police officers are [and] how they act. And just because something in Minneapolis happened or in Nevada, it doesn’t mean that’s indicative of the Grand Prairie Police Department.”
I would venture to say that’s the same type of response that many would say of the Lewisville Police Department. So I would really encourage that we start this effort with our community, including our faith-based organizations, because they are easily the heartbeat of what’s going on.
As the chief of police, what specific actions will you take to build trust and develop relationships both within and externally?
As I was researching this department, your website is very informative and transparent for those who have questions. You can readily find information on stats and reports. What maybe we can work on is the connection with one another. This field can be very toxic and trying. And it’s important that we are forming these relationships like you’ve heard us talking about over and over again.
We do so by meeting with those in our community and meeting with our neighbors, walking the blocks, meeting the homeowners, going to council meetings to see what are issues and complaints that have become more important, what are the good things that are going on that we can continue with that momentum.
I would do everything in my power with the men and women of Lewisville to make sure we have these relationships firm and steady. Because I’d much rather us have a walk or a march together hand in hand, whether it’s a protest of certain things or a counterprotest. I’d much rather us be lockstep with the members of our community versus having to put up a front for protests.
What steps will you take to ensure that the Police Department responds effectively to emergencies while minimizing harm?
We’ve talked about setting up our officers with training and experience. I emphatically agree. It’s also imperative that we are training our first-line supervisors to make decisions and empowering them to make decisions. Our first-line supervisors have 80% control over our line-level officers and civilian staff. If we will train them, mentor them and give them the tools and then allow them to make decisions, more likely than not, a majority of potential liabilities could be minimized or mitigated altogether.
A lot of time, agencies put sergeants out there and they have little mentoring or little supervisory experience. It is imperative that we give them training and the voice to say, “Yes, continue that pursuit and here’s why,” or, “No, based on what you’re sharing with me, I want you to go ahead and discontinue to pursue.”
We just need to empower them to make the decision because I’m not going to be there. These pursuits tend to happen at nighttime. I’m not there. I’m trusting my sergeants to make these decisions.
Brook Rollins
It’s no secret that policing in America is experiencing one of the more challenging times over the past few decades. What will you do to ensure Lewisville residents and business owners continue to support their Police Department?
The first place we start with maintaining a positive relationship with our residents, our business owners and all the key stakeholders in our town — it begins with our recruiting, our hiring, our training; identifying and finding the right people to be at the Lewisville Police Department. People that are representative of this community, people that are representative of the ideals that we want from our Police Department, and making sure that those people are trained effectively in policy and practice that closely matches those [ideals] to show that this is the function and the idea of our Police Department as we work with our community.
I know from the experience that I’ve had, that this town takes great pride in its relationship with its community. And there’s no intent to try to disrupt that. The only way we can keep that safe is by finding the right training effectively.
Community partners are a large part of what we do and how we intend to operate. One of the things that I intend to do is to communicate with each one of our stakeholders in the interest that serves you best. I think it’s important that if we are interacting with any of these stakeholder groups, that we have an opportunity to listen to what it is [they are] trying to say.
As we make decisions about how we intend to operate in this community, you deserve a seat at that table. And I’m talking to all of you. The department and the community deserve a seat at that table to collaborate.
What have you found to be the most effective way for a police department’s personnel to connect with the community they service to enhance trust and legitimacy?
The way we go about building that trust, enhancing legitimacy within our organization is we recruit, we hire and train the right people. We need people, of course, to be happy and able to do the job. We need people that are going to embody the ideals that our Police Department has for what we expect them to do with the community. And then we are physically present in our community, top to bottom and side to side, whether you are a sworn member or not.
We are present in the community every day, building relationships, talking with people, and making ourselves available to this community. That community will allow us to police, and not the other way around. They will allow us to earn the right to police on a daily basis.
And so our responsibility for the actions we take, the equipment we have and the conduct that we bring is how we do that. And then listening to our community, listening to what they have to say, whether it’s a crime issue or a traffic concern, or a neighborhood safety issue, whatever is important to that community member is something that’s important to us.
We have to be able to communicate and give feedback at any point that we’re able to. The community relies on us to be transparent and accountable to them. After all, we’re earning the right to respond, and every day, we’d better be accountable for it. We’d better be able to talk with them when things go right or when things go wrong. And we can work together on whatever successes we had or opportunities for improvement that exist.
What steps will you take to ensure that the Police Department responds effectively to emergencies while minimizing harm?
So, the Police Department’s primary function is responding to calls for service. Minimizing harm is a very broad term for all the things that we do, whether that’s our actions or the way we interact with citizens. For me, the most important thing is to understand how we respond to our community by taking a good stock of the data that’s available to us to help us understand how we respond to our community.
I prefer to use data to help inform decisions. Are we responding effectively? Are we responding quickly? Is there anything prohibiting us from doing it in a way that is satisfactory to the community?
The second part is about making sure that officers are not getting harmed during the call. It’s very simple to ensure that we have hired and trained officers to respond as accordingly as possible. That is backed by good policy and solid practice. And I’m a big believer in ensuring that each one of those policies matches [our practices] and we are consistently reviewing our policies and our practices to best equip our officers with what it is they need to do their job to avoid any issues that might arise.
The last part is just that community interaction piece. We talked about the importance of building trust and legitimacy in our community. And that means that the expectations of the officers are that when they receive a call, they’re responsive and it is done in the most professional way. Well, [officers] are human beings. The health and wellness of the staff is critically important. Taking care of ourselves and taking care of this department will pave the way for us to do no harm to our citizens.
William Wawro
How do you plan to stay connected with the community and understand its evolving needs?
This profession is constantly changing. It takes one episode to happen on the news. All of a sudden, that’s the biggest and most important thing. Before the critical incident happens, those relationships have to be built. You’ve got to have community input. They’ve got to be constantly part of it. It should not be abnormal to be talking to churches and have that church committee. It should not be abnormal to have community leaders meet often with the police chief and city administration to discuss and deal with those hot-topic issues.
There are so many civic groups out there that you stay connected with. Having the Citizens Police Academy that we run very strongly, and they’re very active part of what we do their connection with us, our training department, we have Citizens Board that is mandated by [Texas Commission on Law Enforcement]. The board is completely involved with our training and what we’re doing.
It’s also about keeping connections with the City Council members who have their communities who meet with them regularly, your city administration, your mayor, who has a broader version of all of that. You have to build those relationships and stay connected with them. They’re the ones that are representative of and voted in by the public. So clearly, they have a connection that’s a little different, and more unique than a police or a fire chief. So seeing all those avenues you got to be reaching out to connecting constantly, that needs to be the norm. And then when the news media hits something, and it’s tough on our profession, you can lean on [those connections] and reach out to them.
As the chief of police, what specific actions will you take to build trust and develop relationships both within and externally?
We can’t be afraid to address the public, and we can’t be afraid to deal with the media if we’re fighting for a greater cause and the reason why we’re doing our job is honorable. We have to be transparent.
Lewisville has been very transparent. If you go to the city of Lewisville webpage, you can read all about us. The good and the bad. It’s all there. And if you call us and want more details, we’ll probably give them to you. We’re not perfect. We’re human. But we take responsibility for those things. As the chief, you often have to take responsibility for 265 employees. Know your job. Know what your officers are doing. Know that they were trained properly and are doing it the right way. Be honest, be humble, and we’ll be OK.
We have a great department. We’ve got a great city. And that transparency is relatively easy right now for us. The face of Lewisville looks good right now, and my vision is to keep it that way. We have a good reputation for a reason because our front-line officers, our records, our jailers treat people professionally.
What steps will you take to ensure that the Police Department responds effectively to emergencies while minimizing harm?
When you’re talking about emergency response to a call, we’re talking harm to potential suspects, to the victim and trying to prevent more harm to them, harm to the officer, to the community or to the reputation of a police department. There’s a lot of levels of harm here.
Excellent training and top-of-the-line training, so that officers know what legal rights we have to use force and when not to use force. The greatest or only supplement for experience is realistic training. Giving the officer multiple options for less-lethal force, having those tools and equipment, the training to deal with de-escalation and talking down and not having to go violent to take control. There are so many different aspects there.
It also stems back to the reputation and making sure that our policies and procedures allow officers the opportunity to discern what is needed and to make some of those decisions. I believe in leadership at every level. The chief has a leadership role. But all the way down to the bottom line. We do that by teaching competency, helping each other, and specific training with understanding how the laws work, understanding our policies and procedures, and empowering our officers to make those decisions.