Dallas Morning News
DALLAS — Behind the diffident demeanor, David Kunkle is a smart guy – smarter than most people still, at this late date, seem to realize.
His shrewd exit strategy for retiring from the Dallas police chief’s job is as carefully calculated as any other move he has made in his quietly pursued but ever-escalating career.
With five years’ tenure, he has battled the dragon longer than many of his predecessors, suffering no more damage along the way than the occasional blister or singed finger. He clearly recognizes that prolonging the engagement merely increases the danger of one day getting roasted alive.
“I’ve decided to term-limit myself,” he told my colleagues this week. “You have to go when you are not pressured to leave.”
The lesson seems simple enough, but ego has a way of obscuring the obvious. Timing a graceful exit – and sticking to the plan – is as deft a professional act as landing the job in the first place.
I haven’t had a lot to say publicly about Chief Kunkle during his tenure, because it seemed like a little bit of a conflict. His ex-wife – to be perfectly blunt, one of his ex-wives – is my husband’s sister. It’s debatable whether that tenuous prior connection still qualifies me as a relative, but I like to think it qualifies me as a friend.
So maybe I’m biased. But it’s going to be difficult to find another police chief as pragmatic and conscientious as David Kunkle, especially in the intermittently vaudevillian political arena that is Dallas City Hall.
Obviously, he’s not without his critics. He has been castigated as not particularly tight with the rank-and-file and quick and heavy-handed with the discipline.
And he’s taken a little heat over departmental crime-reporting practices, which classified some crimes in a manner that cast a rosy glow on the crime stats.
Well, I’ll leave it to you to weigh those charges against the plus side of the ledger sheet cited by his admirers: reductions in violent crimes, better response times, more manpower.
Credit is certainly due for those organizational improvements. But to be in a position to make them, he had to operate in a profoundly challenging political environment – a skill that many of his predecessors lacked.
Kunkle managed to make improvements without promoting fools or protecting bullies; he got along at City Hall without making overt political alliances; he balanced the demands of Dallas’ many conflicting constituencies.
Street cops may not think he was a champion, but he upgraded the department’s reputation, taking over after an especially demoralizing string of scandals. Under his leadership, the DPD has become a more honorable place to work, not just in the eyes of its employees, but of the community it purports to serve.
Even before we became quasi-relatives, back when Kunkle was the chief of the Arlington Police Department and I was a rookie reporter as green as a tender spring leaf, I thought he was one of the good guys.
Good because he believed in candor when a lie or a cover-up would have been easier or more expedient. Good because he wasn’t naive about the political dimension of public service, yet he never took the cynical view that being a good leader consisted entirely of knowing which special interests to appease.
David Kunkle will leave the Dallas Police Department in considerably better condition than he found it, and in this city, that’s saying a lot.
I have an instinctive loathing for rolling out mawkish clichés about “giving back” and “making a difference” – but this is one public official who has actually delivered.
Let’s hope his successor can measure up. He’ll be a hard act to follow.
Copyright 2009 Dallas Morning News