Series 1: Papers : Police Hiring - City of Dallas Policy and Mica England, 1992 (2024)

Reset Brightness 0

Reset Contrast 0

Reset Saturation 0

Reset Sharpness 0

Reset Exposure 0

Reset Hue 0

Reset Gama 0

Applying filters

 
{. '!.^ - p , ,+ fix,., r" , ,y:"" y .n . , -+tS ,"yRp /y -c:. ;4~
MON"
,.
"4NUMM"
- - ----------
r
Newsom receiving twenty year certificate from Chief Billy Prince
EVENTS: It's kinda neat when some-
one comes across and realizes that.
NEWSOM: Other sergeants I have
associated with - one night we all
were discussing gays, and one said,
"I can't think of a reason for us not
to hire gays." Quite a turnabout,
and it made me feel very good
when I heard it.
EVENTS: Is there any possibility of
that policy being changed?
NEWSOM: I'm sure; we have al-
ready changed our training as far
as cultural awareness. goes.
EVENTS: We heard good things
about your training rookies at the
Dallas Police Academy.
NEWSOM: We had always had
much info on cultural awareness.
Many times our officers are fresh
out of college as opposed to having
any real world experience. Of
course, gay training had been kinda
ignored so I sat down with Bill
Nelson, who was president at that
time of the Dallas Gay Alliance.
He just opened up the archives to
me, gave me memos between the
Gay Alliance and the police de-
partment, newspaper articles on
raids on bathhouses, bars and so
forth - he just opened all these
26 FH EVENTS
things up to me. So I was able to
have some people at the police
academy restructure the cultural
awareness training on gays.
EVENTS: That's terrific.
NEWSOM: There are gay activists
that were not happy with the train-
ing that we had had, and this was
much more acceptable to them -
still not 100% acceptable - but
when the blacks had problems, dif-
ferent people from the group had
been brought in for discussion and
planning, sort of a panel type
group. And they will not do that
with the gays at this point.
EVENTS: They won't!
NEWSOM: Not yet.
EVENTS: God, I could imagine
bringing in someone like Bill
Sanders.
NEWSOM: Oh yeah! Bill would be
excellent.
EVENTS: He speaks well, looks
like or better than everyone else...
NEWSOM: Bill is great, I think
the world of him. I rode one of
Bill's horses at the rodeo.
EVENTS: That's great.
NEWSOM: By the way I mentioned
Terry Tebedo several times.
EVENTS: I haven't met him.
NEWSOM: Terry passed away
about a year ago, which was a
terrible sad thing. The chief of the
Central Division was Lowell Can-
naday, and he attended Terry's
funeral as I did. It was actually a
memorial service and Cannaday's
wife, Rusty, also came. Halloween
is a big event on Cedar Springs
Road. All of the gays and a lot of
non-gays dress up in costume and
parade the streets. Chief Cannaday
and his wife would always come
down to see this event. One year
when the chief had to be out of
town, I had carried his wife down
there, introduced her to Bill Nelson
and Terry and some of the others
involved in Gay Alliance. She liked
Terry - you could not meet him
and not like him - he was that kind
of person. She was very touched.
I went to the memorial service in
uniform. In all of the things I've
been able to do in the police de-
partment I had 100% support of
Chief Cannaday.
EVENTS: This is very unusual.
NEWSOM: If I wanted him to go
out and talk to Bill or whoever he
would say, "Okay, let's go!" By his
going with me it helped immensely.
RODEO
I
 

Permanent URL (This Page)

Univesal Viewer

International Image Interoperability Framework (This Page)