Sitting near Trinity Park’s duck pond on a warm February afternoon, Claudia Verduzco felt safe enjoying nature with her two young children. But she doesn’t feel that way in every Fort Worth park, especially once the sun sets. Drug activity in some southeast parks has kept her away.
Higher police visibility could help reduce those challenges and make parks more secure for moms like her, Verduzco said.
“There’s people who work during the day. They want to go out and maybe relax a little bit at night, and they just don’t feel safe so they end up just staying home,” she said. “If there was to be more police officers that can make their rounds and just make sure everything is fine, then it will be safer.”
Verduzco could see off-duty Fort Worth police officers patrolling parks if a new proposal gets the go-ahead from City Council members. Parks officials are seeking funds from the city’s Crime Control and Prevention District, or CCPD, to pay police officers to work overtime hours in each of Fort Worth’s six park districts. City Council members sit on the CCPD board and approve its budget and priorities.
What is the Crime Control and Prevention District, and how does it work?
Fort Worth’s Crime Control and Prevention District is a special purpose tax district that collects funds from a half-cent sales tax. The district’s budget funds crime prevention and intervention programs for local, registered nonprofits.
Fort Worth police administer the funds, while the board of directors — all City Council members — manages the budget and evaluates programs. CCPD policies say district-funded programs must reduce violent crime and gang-related activity, increase resident safety and youth safety or reduce juvenile crime through prevention and intervention programs.
The $458,340 program would fund 4,992 police overtime hours during the city’s 2025 financial year, which kicks off Oct. 1. That comes out to about 16 hours a week per district, said parks superintendent Clint Wyatt.
Under the plan, off-duty officers would respond to lower-priority calls and growing issues within parks, such as homeless encampments or off-road vehicles, Wyatt said.
“Something as simple as having a police officer’s car in the parking lot or an officer’s presence in a recreation center, it automatically deters any type of criminal activity,” Wyatt said. “Our intention isn’t to be a ‘gotcha’ type thing. It’s more letting people know, educating them and promoting overall safety within the park.”
Parks staff have provided information to Fort Worth police about the request to provide off-duty certified peace officers to patrol parks, said police spokesperson Tracy Carter.
“We are currently reviewing this request and the need in order to determine how best to address it,” Carter said by email.
Not everyone supports the idea. Pastor and community organizer Kyev Tatum serves on Fort Worth’s park and recreation advisory board, appointed by Jared Williams to represent the southwest district.
Tatum doesn’t want to minimize anyone’s concerns about crime or cleanliness in parks, but he’s not sure more policing is the answer. CCPD funds should go toward organizations and programs that prevent these kinds of crimes from happening, he said.
“When I think parks, I think peace and tranquility,” Tatum said. “I think mental health, refreshment, revitalizing. I just don’t want the police out in the parks like that. It’s such a tense situation when it’s always police.”
City says it needs more crime data to justify park ranger program
Originally, Wyatt and assistant parks director Sandra Youngblood wanted to create a park ranger-like program employing six full-time civilian staff to patrol parks. They sought funding from CCPD to support the program, which would have focused on educating park visitors about ordinances and responding to calls.
That proposal failed to gain traction among City Council members last year, in part due to the high cost of adding full-time employees and a lack of data showing where crime was taking place in city parks, Youngblood said. Officials submitted the park ranger program to be included in the city’s 2024 general budget, but that request was also denied, she said.
Wyatt expects the overtime proposal to earn a warmer reception from city leadership. He and Youngblood presented details to the CCPD board’s budget committee in February. Council members typically approve the budget in August.
“Anytime you’re adding a full-time employee, you have got to look at long-term benefits packages and all that,” Wyatt said. “We’re not asking for full-time employees. We’re not asking for additional staff. We’re just asking for overtime funds.”
Cities across Texas vary in how they enforce laws and city ordinances in their park systems. Dallas, Austin and Houston employ rangers who monitor parks, trails and recreation facilities to educate visitors on regulations and safety measures. San Antonio employs park police officers who have power to arrest and issue citations.
Wyatt previously worked in Corpus Christi, which employs a dozen park enforcement officers through its code enforcement department. He wondered why Fort Worth — a city three times larger than Corpus Christi — couldn’t have a similar program.
“You do notice how many little calls you get that add up to a customer service thing, which is really what park patrol or a park ranger program is,” Wyatt said. “It just provides that presence, that crime deterrent. That’s something I saw that I thought we needed.”
The demand for more safety measures in Fort Worth is clear to Youngblood, who pointed to the results of the city’s 2021 community survey as an example. Of the 1,858 households who completed the survey, 50% said they felt safe in city parks. Nearly 30% said they felt “neutral” about safety in city parks, while the remaining 20% said they did not feel safe.
The feeling of safety has decreased over the past two years, according to 2023 community survey results released in early March. About 43% of respondents said they felt safe in city parks — well below the average of 61% in large communities across the U.S. Less than a third of respondents said they were satisfied with street lighting in city parks.
While community survey results suggest security concerns, there is little specific data showing crime trends in parks, Youngblood said. In many instances, criminal incidents or city ordinance violations in parks are not reported to police. If the incidents are reported, residents and police often list a home or business address rather than the park’s address, Youngblood said.
“We really have a hard time documenting what crime goes on in our parks,” Youngblood said. “We are starting to gather the necessary data that hopefully, one day, will justify having more than just 16 hours of police in each of our parks districts on a weekly basis.”
Without data, it’s unclear what crime is happening in parks and how police could resolve those problems, Tatum said.
“When you just run things based on feelings, a lot of money goes into a lot of different areas,” Tatum said. “The concern is real. Their approach to resolving it, which has always been Fort Worth’s approach, is just throw more law enforcement at it. The immediate knee jerk response — hire more enforcement, spend more money — I’m just not an advocate of that.”
‘Don’t give police more problems’
Parks leaders saw the impact of having boots on the ground last summer, when three college interns served as ambassadors for Tandy Hills Natural Area in east Fort Worth. In addition to training in natural resources management, interns educated residents about park policies and documented instances where people drove ATVs onto native prairies or photographers went off trail to take scenic pictures of clients.
Don Young, the longtime leader of the Friends of Tandy Hills Natural Area, has raised concerns about people trampling the prairie for more than a decade. He’s called police to report vandalism and other city ordinance violations, but officers typically don’t respond due to higher priority calls, Young said.
He doesn’t have much confidence that the city’s overtime proposal will have a large impact on the issues he sees at Tandy Hills. Tandy Hills needs a dedicated park ranger, but that’s not something the city has been willing to commit to, Young said.
“But it’s something they’re talking about. I imagine in 2025, we might see some action,” Young said. “Even in this time of year when there’s nothing blooming at Tandy Hills, we still get large crowds. But in a couple months when it’s looking very photogenic, it’s going to be starting up again where I’m out there most every day playing park ranger, even though I don’t have a uniform.”
If the city operates a park ranger program in the future, Tatum would like to see it operated by civilians rather than police.
“How can we, not them, come up with a solution?” Tatum said. “People solve problems. Don’t give police more problems. We can solve this problem.”
Wyatt and Youngblood say increasing the amount of police hours dedicated to parks would make people more comfortable going to their neighborhood parks.
“The majority of people in the park are there to enjoy the park,” Wyatt said. “The only people that are going to be upset are the people who are doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing.”
Haley Samsel is the environmental reporter for the Fort Worth Report. You can reach them at haley.samsel@fortworthreport.org.
At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.