By Lisa Falkenberg, The Associated Press
DALLAS (AP) -- When David Kunkle was a boy, he would have his friends’ parents drop him off in front of a neatly painted house with a manicured lawn. But it wasn’t his home.
After the parents had driven off, Kunkle would cross the street to his drab little house with peeling paint and bald dirt yard.
His father, who would later be diagnosed a manic-depressive, had left the family, and his mother was an alcoholic who disappeared almost every night into a fog of beer, cigarettes and loneliness.
But Kunkle brought order to the home. He washed clothes, cleaned house and cooked franks and beans for his younger brother and sister.
He was popular, played high school football, went to college and became a Dallas police officer at 21. And last week, at 53, he became Dallas police chief, taking over a department poisoned by scandal, racial tensions and sagging morale and confronted with the highest big-city crime rate in America.
Kunkle says his upbringing helped prepare him for the task at hand.
“At an early age I learned to be responsible for things,” he said. “I’m very much a loner, which allows me to kind of separate myself, make decisions without being part of the group.”
Kunkle said his father was a brilliant man who earned a master’s in engineering from Stanford University and started a semiconductor business. But he left Texas when Kunkle was about 12, and now, at age 74, drifts into and out of homelessness. Kunkle’s mother died of cirrhosis of the liver at 45.
Kunkle said he himself did not have a drink until his mid-20s. The longtime marathoner said he works through his problems by running.
“In a lot of ways, I’m incredibly stable, but you couldn’t tell that by the divorces,” said Kunkle, who married his fourth wife in June. He would not elaborate on past marital problems.
Kunkle spent 20 years reforming departments in nearby Grand Prairie and Arlington, then became Arlington’s deputy city manager in 1999.
Now back in Dallas, the nation’s ninth-largest city, with 1.2 million people, Kunkle must rebuild a 3,000-member police department broken by years of cronyism, mistrust, questionable hiring practices and lax accountability standards.
His predecessor, Terrell Bolton, was fired last summer for poor job performance.
Dallas has held the highest big-city crime rate for six straight years, according to FBI statistics. And in 2002, dozens of Mexican immigrants were wrongly jailed after police informants planted fake cocaine -- bags of pool chalk -- on them.
When Kunkle applied for Dallas chief, friends asked why.
“I thought he’d lost his mind,” said Sue Phillips, president of the neighborhood organization East Arlington Renewal. “It wasn’t that I didn’t think he could do the job, but that’s a complex problem they have. I thought, `My goodness, at this stage in his life, why would he want to go back into that fray?”’
Kunkle said that after years of watching the once-proud Dallas police force slide into disarray, he wants go back and raise up the department that raised him. He said he plans to push for greater accountability and urgency.
Those who know Kunkle say he brings to the job lightning wit, intensity and a sometimes painful propensity toward openness.
“That department is going to be cracked wide open,” said Lt. Ron Meine, who sometimes disagreed with Kunkle after he took over the Grand Prairie department in 1982.
At 31, Kunkle was the third chief in six months to try to tame a department that Kunkle said was seen as brutal, corrupt and inefficient. Once, when an officer reported using excessive force, Kunkle suspended him and reported the incident to the media.
“I felt like it was something we could just handle with a written reprimand,” Meine said. “He said, `No, this is a serious matter and we need to make this known that this is not going to be tolerated in the department anymore.”’
“The man is a man of character. It’s as simple as that,” said Arlington Deputy Chief Michael Ikner, who started in Arlington with Kunkle in 1985. “The man knows right from wrong.”
Ikner, one of the few blacks on the Arlington force at the time, said he was branded a troublemaker by some commanders after he challenged officers for using racial slurs. But Kunkle, who is white, saw a leader in Ikner.
“He allowed the rank and file -- men, women, Asians, African Americans -- to have a seat at the table,” Ikner said. “If you could perform, he really didn’t care about your gender, your ethnicity.”
In Arlington, Kunkle worked to improve communication between police and citizens. He demanded each new class of officers be 50 percent minority and women. The number of blacks on the force went from 3 percent to 12 percent, and Hispanics from 4 percent to 12 percent.
“It was a tough thing for some people to swallow who felt that there were white males getting passed over,” said Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson, who worked under Kunkle in Arlington. But he said Kunkle gained officers’ respect.
Can Kunkle do the job in Dallas? “I think if anyone can, he will,” Anderson said.