DOJ warns of ‘significant concerns’ over potential First Amendment violations
A Texas police chief says his officers mishandled a confrontation with street preachers outside the city’s pride event last month as federal prosecutors raised concerns about potential civil rights violations linked to the incident.
In an interview with ABC affiliate WFAA on Tuesday, Fort Worth Police Chief Eddie Garcia said the department was “wrong” when its officers threatened to cite preachers for disorderly conduct based on complaints that their speech offended attendees of the city’s annual Trinity Pride Fest event.
“The biggest issue that I have is, just the conversations and the way that we were describing what is lawful, what is not lawful,” Garcia said in the segment. “When we’re right, we’re right, and when we’re wrong, we’re wrong.”
“There certainly was a better way to have that communication, and we were wrong in the manner in which we communicated that. Certainly, we’re going to take accountability for it.”
That accountability, according to Garcia, includes in-person First Amendment training for the entire Fort Worth Police Department.
“We are not a perfect profession, and my officers will make mistakes from time to time,” he said. “We’re going to learn from it and get better from it and to ensure these things don’t happen again.”
While he didn’t provide details, the training has already included “refresher courses” for command staff and will offer further training to officers and sergeants.
“It’ll be face-to-face training,” he said. “We’re training the command staff first, then we’re going to train our supervisors, and then we’re gonna train our officers.”
David Grisham, a longtime evangelist, was cited by Fort Worth police in an incident captured on video at the Trinity Pride Fest in downtown Fort Worth on June 27. The now-viral video showed an unidentified female police officer — the same officer who prevented a separate Christian evangelist group from entering the event last year — threatening to arrest Grisham and Rich Penkoski, another member of the street preaching team, during the public event.
As the street preaching group continued to question police about the warning while they were moved to an area outside police barricades, the unidentified officer is heard telling them, “If someone is offended by your talking, then we have a problem. … If they are offended by your speech, OK, I will write you a ticket, and we’ll go from there.”
Grisham was ultimately issued a citation for “unreasonable noise,” but no further explanation was provided. The city of Fort Worth website states that its “unreasonable noise” ordinance is “intended to apply to, but is not limited to” noise linked to animals or construction work.
A Fort Worth Police spokesman later said that while the video circulating online “captures only a portion of the interactions between the officer and the individuals involved,” FWPD also “acknowledges that an officer involved in the incident made certain statements that were not accurate.”
While Garcia said an internal investigation is underway, he clarified that Officer Stogner, the officer seen in the viral video, is not on administrative leave and that he wouldn’t be influenced by “outside noise” when it comes to the investigation.
“I’m not going to allow outside noise to separate, you know, I’ve been a police chief for a while,” Garcia explained. “I’ve been a police officer for 34 years, and I’m not going to allow outside influences influence a decision on any type of — whether it’s training, discipline or what have you.”
Since going viral, the incident has drawn national attention, culminating in a formal letter from the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division raising concerns about a potential pattern of viewpoint discrimination.
On Monday, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent a letter to Fort Worth City Attorney Leann D. Guzman outlining potential pattern-or-practice concerns. The letter acknowledged video footage apparently showing “FWPD officers instructing individuals to cease their speech or move the location of their speech based on the content of the speakers’ expression.”
The letter warned such practices would “raise significant concerns under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and federal civil rights law.”
Dhillon’s letter also references a prior 2015 consent decree in which the city agreed not to interfere with protected expression and requests extensive documentation within 30 days, including current First Amendment policies, training materials, complaint records since 2015, and enforcement records related to the consent decree.
In his interview with WFAA, Garcia said he hadn’t yet seen the DOJ letter, but he would “be happy, really, to sit down with the DOJ,” adding, “We’re going through training. We’re training the entire department, and we’re going to get better as a police department.”
