Chapter 2: Reporting the Story

Discover—Reporting

Gypsy Cops - WFAA-TV, Dallas, Texas

Reporter Byron Harris of WFAA-TV in Dallas, Texas, got a phone call one day from a man who claimed that a local small-town police chief was involved in child pornography. Harris' first question was, "Who cares?" "It's an interesting story in itself, this guy's corrupt, but there's corruption everywhere in the world," he said. "Why is this important?"

Harris knew that a state commission monitors police officers in Texas, so he requested the police chief's file. It turned out the man had been arrested twice and stripped of his "master peace officer" certificate for claiming a phony college degree, but he still managed to get a job as a police chief. Harris now had the answer to his first question.

"I care about it because—number one—small towns conspire to cover up the records of police officers when they leave," he said. "They will fire them or in most cases give them a chance to resign and the reasons for their resignation are never delineated so the next police department down the pike doesn't really know what it is, in this person's background, that makes them questionable."

Harris contacted other police officers around the state who had complained about the chief. He obtained copies of key documents. He even talked to the chief on the phone more than once. But he couldn't air the story without getting the chief on camera. That turned out to be the hardest part of the story.

"The little town where he worked is an hour and a half from here, and every time I went down to catch him on duty, to just walk in on him, he wasn't there," Harris said. "And we would hear that he was coming to work that day so we'd drive down and he wouldn't show up."

The state commission file listed a home address, but it turned out to be a mailbox at a postal service store. The man who ran the place said the chief lived with his mother. "I staked out his mother's house for a while. I knew that wasn't going to work. I found that he'd taken a security job at an apartment house and I couldn't find him there."

Eventually, Harris learned that the chief sometimes worked after hours at a topless bar. He took a small camera and staked him out there, but at 4 a.m. the man snuck out the back door. At that point, Harris said, he gave up on the story. "I said we've spent too much time on this. I'm not going to do this anymore. And all of a sudden, out of the blue, the mailbox guy calls and says 'I got his address, don't tell anybody.'"

Harris' persistence paid off. He got the story and exposed the common small-town practice of hiring "gypsy cops." The police chief was forced to resign.