Troubles Left Out Of Texas Legend Linger With Top Cop In Chicago

DALLAS, TX — It was quiet at Main and Lamar streets, where on July 7, 2016, Texas lawman David O. Brown issued the order to detonate a robot-delivered bomb that killed a sniper who had slain five police officers that day.

On a recent Friday afternoon, a man wearing a face mask reclined on a bus stop bench at the infamous corner as I took in the scene of what's believed to be the first time in American history a remote-control explosive was used by local law enforcement to kill a suspect.

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The man said he remembered the bloody day in downtown Dallas. I told him that I had extended my stay in his town as part of my storytelling tour of America on the chance I might learn more about the former Dallas police chief, who now serves as the top cop in my hometown of Chicago, where shootings and murders continue to spike with the summer heat.

"Do you remember anything special about police Chief Brown … besides ordering the robot bomb to blow up the sniper?" I asked.

The man shook his head. "No," he said.

That was the start of my search for something remarkable about Brown that I couldn't read online or in a book that might give cynical Chicagoans reason to have faith in his leadership.

See, Chicagoans like me have been spoon-fed too much of the legend of David O. Brown.

We know he was a high school football star in a rough-and-tumble part of Dallas that, he said, folks living on Chicago's South and West sides could relate to. He rose through the police ranks to become chief, and ultimately a national figure, partly for what he said after the bomb went off five years ago near the corner where I was standing.

“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country," Brown said. "Every societal failure we put it off on the cops to solve.”

Brown's public call — for politicians to focus on policies that ease the burden of American shortcomings instead of heaping the responsibility of mental illness, drug addiction and failing schools onto the back of local police departments — thrust him into the spotlight.

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker called Brown "the voice America needs." A lot of people — including Brown, it seems — took Parker's assessment as truth.

A few months after a national ovation, Brown retired after 33 years at the police department. He scored a job as a policing pundit on ABC News and wrote op-eds in major newspapers.

A Harvard-trained celebrity memoir collaborator penned his book, "Called to Rise: A life in Faithful Service to the Community That Made Me," published in 2017.

A year later, I'd learn from a public records search during my reporting visit, Brown had a five-bedroom house built for about $600,000 in a ritzy corner of a North Dallas suburb, with manicured lawns, paved nature trails, shaded fishing ponds and a neighbors-only pool. It's now worth $819,752 and has a $17,702.47 property tax bill and a homestead exemption status that's "confidential," according to the Collin County Tax Assessor-Collector's office.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot put out a national call for a new police superintendent. Brown applied for the job and got it. He came to my town talking like the hero cop folks read about in his memoir. He told Chicagoans of his "moon shot" goal to bring historic declines in shootings and murders.

Since then, though, shootings and murders have continued to increase under his command, which has spanned the worst of the coronavirus crisis shutdowns and last year's summer of civil unrest that left parts of Chicago looted and burned.

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There's a growing chorus of aldermen, activists, police and academics who said they don't have confidence in Brown's ability to lead Chicago's beleaguered department during such difficult times. Lightfoot still backs Brown, though I'm not sure why.

So over a few sweltering days in Dallas, I talked to locals about Brown at coffee shops, dog parks and on the sidewalk where folks waited to enter a rooftop bar.

None of them had glowing things to say about his policing strategies. Nobody called him a hero. Not a single person told me they think Dallas would be safer if the local police were under his command. Most folks on the street didn't remember Brown at all until I brought up his decision to detonate a robot bomb.

After a series of casual chats, I read statistics about Brown's tenure in Dallas that suggested his "moon shot" goal for Chicago didn't come from a leader who had accomplished such a thing. There were more shootings and murders in Dallas in 2016 when Brown retired than before he was appointed police chief in 2009.

A man getting on a commuter train in Dallas' Cedars neighborhood, steps from where Brown had an apartment across from police headquarters, didn't mince words.

"The same trouble sure follows him, doesn't it?" Mick Hernandez asked. "Look at all that happened here and what's happening in Chicago. I never thought much of him."

I also called outspoken police officers, politicians, activists and reporters. One guy who works at City Hall confessed to me — on the condition that I leave his name out of it — to having a "begrudging respect" for Brown.

We talked for a while about Brown's "complicated" legacy in Dallas. He said that "as someone who interacted with him, I know he will lie to your face. … The truth is malleable with him."

He's not the first person to tell me that about Brown. I suspect reporters in Chicago, especially those who have fact-checked Brown's assertions about the police department's response to civil unrest last summer, probably agreed. They've found Brown's comments to the public "misleading," "partially true," "unsubstantiated" and "false."

The Dallas Morning News pointed out factual flaws tucked in details of Brown's memoir.

The most notable allegation of a revisionist history noted how Brown attempted to diminish harsh criticism and calls for his ouster that he faced as police chief in March 2016.

Brown claimed the outrage stemmed from resentment over his firing of a "popular cop who'd wrongfully shot an unarmed suspect."

The newspaper fact-checker argued the second attempt in six months to get Brown fired was much more complicated than that. All four Dallas police associations wanted Brown out as chief, and a handful of elected officials agreed.

During my visit, I talked with one of them, former City Council member Philip Kingston, a Democrat, who said he was "a fan of Brown's, at least initially."

Kingston, now a lawyer and lobbyist, said the "unpredictably pathetic" leadership of his successor, former Dallas Chief Renee Hall, "masked the fact that Brown's administration was marked by failure and dishonesty."

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Let it be known, Kingston and Brown have plenty of professional beef.

The councilman battled with Brown over the police chief's opposition to a proposal to decriminalize marijuana possession in Dallas with a cite-and-release policy. Kingston, a Democrat, also sided with a minority of City Council colleagues who wanted Brown fired.

After retiring as Dallas police chief, Brown — who has told Chicago reporters that he doesn't get involved in politics — starred in a billboard campaign advertisement in a failed attempt to urge voters to support Kingston's City Council opponent.

Still, it's hard to ignore Kingston's assessment that Brown's tenure as Chicago's top cop bears a striking similarity to his time as Dallas police chief before he used the robot bomb to stop an active shooter.

Kingston was among a chorus of activists, policing advocates, rank-and-file officers, budget hawks and elected officials who criticized Brown's top-heavy, centralized structure of Dallas' police department.

In Chicago, Brown also took heat for ditching the decentralized community policing strategy of his predecessor in favor of the centralized task forces deployed in Dallas.

Kingston said he fought against Brown's assertion that hiring more officers would lead to a decrease in violent crime and criticized the then-Dallas police for spending nearly double the police department's overtime budget.

In Chicago, Brown blamed the county criminal justice system for making the city less safe by releasing violent offenders on electronic monitoring — and not his policing strategy — for spikes in violent crime, including a particularly bloody July 4th weekend when more than 100 people were shot and wounded, 19 fatally.

As for the Chicago Police Department's overtime, Brown ran up a huge bill as he did in Dallas.
He exceeded the $95 million budget approved by the City Council by 86 percent, or $82.5 million.

And last month, the Chicago City Council — in an act of political theater, mind you — called in Brown for questioning under the threat of a "no confidence" vote if he didn't show.

Brown testified at the hearing. He relied on anecdotes rather than statistics to defend his criticism of prosecutors and judges for being too lenient on gun offenders. A Chicago alderman was so fed up with the glaring lack of data guiding Brown's public safety strategies that he called Brown a "liar."

None of the news shocked Kingston.

"One of the lessons I've learned about crisis leadership [since Brown was chief] is you can be really a total failure and sort of striking a somber tone and saying comforting things in the wake of tragedy, you don't have to be smart or good. … David Brown is exactly like that," he said.

"Look, July 7, 2016, is the only reason David Brown still has a job in policing. Other than that July 7, the rest of his record would not have caused anyone to hire him in law enforcement. I think Mayor Lightfoot, she clearly did no due diligence on this hire. I thought she was supposed to be better than Rahm [Emanuel]. What is going on with ya'll up there?"

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My stop in Dallas confirmed what I suspected all along: Brown can never live up to his hero legend. Heck, as far as I can tell, regular folks in Dallas hardly remember him.

I did learn that Brown didn't even live in Dallas while serving as police chief, which was permitted by local ordinances. Brown's family home was in a south suburb, and he kept an apartment next to police headquarters in a building with a cute law-enforcement name, "The Beat."

And after getting hired as Chicago's top cop, Brown never put a "for sale" sign in front of his beautiful Texas dream house — the one his critics said he visits too often to do the 24/7 job that is police superintendent effectively.

A gossipy Chicago gadfly suggested I pop by Brown's place while I was in town.

"What if he answers the door on the same weekend when 100 people get shot in Chicago?" he said. "Then, you got a story."

So on a recent Saturday — when 10 people died and 33 got shot and wounded in Chicago — I went to visit Brown's house in the Dallas suburbs before heading out of town.

The grass seemed freshly cut. Potted plants out front had died in the Texas heat. Weeds littered the landscaping. A thin tree in the front yard desperately needed a good pruning.

I rang the doorbell. Nobody answered.

A neighbor was throwing a party. So I stopped to ask her about the Browns.

She said they're good neighbors who keep to themselves, home-school their daughter and have people over for Bible study on some Sundays.

"I haven't seen them today," the neighbor told me. "They definitely still live there."

I asked her if she knew anything remarkable about Brown, other than that he's currently Chicago's top cop and five years ago ordered up a robot bomb to blow up a sniper in downtown Dallas.

"Wow, you're schooling me about my neighborhood," she said. "I had no idea that's who he is."

The friendly neighbor went back to her party guests.

I left Texas with a new perspective on Brown's troubles in Chicago.

His struggles communicating policing strategies, sticking to overtime budgets and, maybe, telling the truth is the stuff that got left out of the prevailing narrative in the Texas lawman's legend spoon-fed to Chicagoans hoping for a hero.

Brown should get better at those things — or spend more time tending to his yard in Texas.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots."

This summer, follow KONKOL ON THE ROAD:

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• Time To Drive — Out Of The Land Of Fakequity and Faux Reforms