Tag Archives: Plano PD

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This top cop seeks to downplay the history he is making

There seemed to be a certain inevitability to the course that Ed Drain’s professional journey would take him.

He served as assistant chief of police in Plano, Texas, working in the Dallas suburban community for 22 years. Then he got a call about three years ago from Amarillo’s interim city manager, who asked him to come to the Panhandle to serve as the city’s interim police chief; Drain accepted the post.

Then he got hired as the Amarillo’s permanent chief of police.

Only that the term “permanent” is a relative term. Drain is coming back to Plano, this time as the city’s top law enforcement officer. Plano hired him as its first African-American police chief, a designation that doesn’t seem to phase Ed Drain one little bit.

This man’s skin color means nothing to the way he will approach his job, yet Dallas-Fort Worth media have been making a bit of hay over Plano’s decision to bring Ed Drain back to where he spent a lot of time protecting and serving the community. Indeed, I don’t recall the Amarillo media making quite as much noise about Drain’s racial background when he took over as police chief there.

I don’t know Drain well. He and I have spoken over the years. He arrived in Amarillo after I had left my post with the newspaper there. We belonged to the same Rotary Club. We would chat on occasion and I would thank him for the job he was doing as Amarillo chief of police.

He brought back community policing, elevating officers’ profile in the neighborhoods they served. Drain said upon his hiring as Plano’s police chief that he intends to follow that policy at his new job as well. Good call, chief.

Ed Drain is a good man and I am confident he will serve his new constituents in Plano well.

I know this is cliché, but Amarillo’s loss clearly is Plano’s gain.

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Amarillo PD chief about to come back home?

This must be said about a man whose name otherwise will live in infamy in the annals of Amarillo municipal government.

The one hire that former interim City Manager Terry Childers made that qualifies as a home run was when he brought Ed Drain in to become chief of police in Amarillo, Texas. Childers eventually resigned in disgrace after popping off publicly about a constituent and making an a** of himself over a misplaced briefcase at a local hotel and a run-in he had with a 9-1-1 dispatcher.

As for Drain, he returned the concept of “community policing” to the city. He instituted progressive police policies. Drain became a presence in the community.

Well, now he’s coming back home to Plano, or so it’s being reported. The Plano Police Department announced today that Drain is its sole finalist for the chief’s job; he had served as deputy police chief when Childers lured him to the Panhandle. Drain says his hiring isn’t a done deal. Well, OK, chief. Whatever you say.

Drain said he has to undergo the requisite background check and the Plano City Council must sign off on a hiring decision.

I’ll just offer an opinion that when a city as substantial as Plano names a lone finalist for a key administrative position, then it looks like a done deal to me.

Whoever becomes the next Amarillo police chief, whenever that occurs, must continue the community policing program that Chief Drain brought back after he succeeded former Chief Robert Taylor.

As for Drain’s apparently pending return to the Metroplex, I am certain he will do a stellar job for a department with which he is intimately familiar.

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Interim police chief gets a leg up

drain

Amarillo has a new interim police chief, who’ll assume his new post on July 1, when Police Chief Robert Taylor retires, climbs aboard his Harley and hits the road.

I join many others in wishing Chief Taylor well and thank him for his 36 years of law enforcement service to the community.

Back to the interim chief selection. The new top cop is Ed Drain, currently on the staff of the Plano Police Department. He got the job after being appointed by the city’s interim city manager, Terry Childers.

The city manager made an interesting statement after he chose Drain to take over as police chief. The question dealt with why Childers went outside the department to find an interim chief. He thought it would be best if he leveled the playing field for all Amarillo PD applicants who might want to seek the police chief’s job.

That’s fine. It levels the field for all the in-house applicants. Ed Drain, though, has a leg up on getting the permanent job if he seeks it, too.

http://www.newschannel10.com/story/32265897/interim-police-chief-named-for-apd

I’m a bit curious as to why the need to go outside the department in the first place.

The last time Amarillo brought in an outsider to run its police department was in the early 1980s, when the late City Manager John Stiff hired Oklahoman Jerry Neal to lead APD.

I wasn’t here in 1981 when Neal got the police chief job, but I’ve heard all about the circumstance he inherited when he came aboard. He took command of a dysfunctional police agency. It wasn’t working.

The police department needed a progressive leader and Stiff found one in Jerry Neal.

Is the Amarillo Police Department in a similar state of disarray now? Hardly. It is working well. Hey, the city witnessed a police department handle a potentially explosive hostage situation just a few days ago with supreme professionalism.

I’m going to presume that the interim chief understands the dynamics that drive a police department such as the one that serves Amarillo. As Drain told NewsChannel 10: “My goal here is to analyze the things that are going on in the department and any areas where I think there needs to be improvement,”  Drain said. “Some of those obviously I’m not going to get done as an interim, but you heard the city manager say incremental improvement, so I want to do that.”

I don’t intend to get ahead of the game here. The new chief is an interim pick, after all. However, his hiring is beginning to look like a done deal.

It makes me wonder: Do we really need a fresh approach to the police department, which I believe is running pretty well?