FORT WORTH, Texas — After George Floyd died in 2020, many law enforcement agencies updated their use of force policies.
The Tarrant County Jail wasn’t one of them.
Records obtained by WFAA show the jail last revised its restraint procedure in 2007 and its use of force policy in 2009.
“Your policies will dictate how your staff behaves,” said Lenard Vare, a former prison warden who testifies as an expert in jail cases. “If your staff is going to operate under antiquated policies and the process that was acceptable 15 to 20 years ago, you're not going to respond appropriately to today's climate.”
Vare reviewed the polices at WFAA’s request and found them lacking. He says, for example, many agencies now explicitly prohibit officers from putting a knee in someone’s back as occurred in Floyd’s death.
“There are other ways to deal with those kinds of individuals,” he said. “I've worked for a lot of Sheriff agencies around the country and …they also have a response requirement that you have to turn the person on their side so they're not dealing with positional asphyxia types of issues.”
The Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement: “Policies are reviewed as needed. The techniques for use of force have not changed in recent years so the policy remains in place.”
This past spring, Tarrant County prisoner Anthony Johnson died from positional and chemical asphyxia after he was a pepper sprayed a knee put on his back. Two jailers have been fired and charged with murder.
The incident with Johnson began after he refused to come out of his cell while jailers were checking for contraband. Jailers struggled with Johnson on the second floor and at times appeared at risk of themselves or Johnson falling over the railing.
“When I first started in doing corrections, the response was if someone refuses to come out, there was a lot of staff that were sent in to sort of forcibly extract the person,” Vare said. “I don't think we need to do that today, because there's no rush. You can have a mental health person come in. You can have a crisis intervention team come in. You can try to verbally deescalate the situation and have the person voluntarily coming out. Hands-on force is not the first thing that you consider.
“That one incident, if I was to just look at that, is indicative of an agency that needs to upgrade its policies,” Vare said. “It needs to upgrade its training.”
Back in May, Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn said a fired jailer used a “technique we do not use or nor condone” when he put a knee in Johnsons’ back after he was restrained. He said a supervisor was fired for letting it happen.
The restraint policy currently states that “when a physical altercation occurs, it will be brought to an end as rapidly as possible and order restored to the area. The least amount of restraint necessary to effect control of the inmate will be utilized.”
However, the policy does not currently speak to putting a knee on someone’s back.
A lawyer representing the jail supervisor has said his client “followed established procedures but since those procedures are lacking he followed established practice where policy was lacking.”
Waybourn, who was elected in 2017, has repeatedly refused to brief the Tarrant County Commissioners' Court on his agency’s policies and procedures. He did so again this week.
County Administrator Chandler Merritt read an email that he received from the sheriff’s office declining to send someone to brief the court on the office’s standard operating procedures.
“The TSCO is heavily mandated by rules and regulations, not only by internal policy but also the state of Texas,” the email said. “Public discussion of our policies and processes would not be productive or practical.
Commissioners, who have approved almost $3 million in settlements related to the jail, expressed their displeasure.
Commissioner Manny Ramirez, a Republican, said that while the sheriff is an independently elected official, he said he thought “in this instance radical transparency is probably the best policy.”
“I don't think the sheriff should be deciding for this court what we can hear and what we can't," Commissioner Roy Brooks, a Democrat, said.
Commissioner Alisa Simmons, one of the sheriff’s most vocal critics, addressed a series of questions to the empty podium, including questioning when was the last time the department conducted a comprehensive review of its procedures.
“I find that lack of transparency deeply, deeply problematic,” Simmons said.
Most departments also have what’s known as General Orders – a set of common rules and standards – that applies to all divisions and units.
However, the Sheriff’s Office does not currently have General Orders. Instead, each individual division has its own Standard Operating Procedure.
“Not to have a department wide sort of thing, I'm not used to seeing that,” Vare said.
Sources tell WFAA that then-Lt. Robert Kelley, who had previously worked in internal affairs, was assigned to write General Orders in the spring 2020. He submitted a draft in early 2021. WFAA obtained a copy of that draft.
The draft, spanning more than 450 pages, contained among other things, a duty to intercede which would have required that if an employee sees “force being used is not objectively reasonable and the employee has a reasonable opportunity to prevent the harm.”
It also would have required employees to “promptly request medical assistance as soon as it is safe and practical to do so following a force incident” and to monitor the “individual’s airway and assist, as necessary, in moving the individual to the ground into a seated position.”
But the General Orders never got implemented.
TCSO told WFAA the draft was not complete and that it had not gone through legal review by the various divisions of the department.
“A General Order project was started but due to lack of manpower it was paused,” the statement said. “We have begun to revisit it over the last year.”
Kelley left TCSO in 2023.