Joel Fitzgerald, police chief finalist: had an ambition that began years ago

Aaron Horne, an inspector with the Philadelphia Police Department and who has supervised thousands of police officers, remembers something Joel Fitzgerald said about 15 years ago.

Fitzgerald was a young sergeant, no more than 30 years old at the time when Horne heard him say: “I’m going to be a police chief.”

At the moment, Horne couldn’t help being a little amused, thinking, “You’re kidding me, kid,” but didn’t voice it because he didn’t want to discourage. “Wow,” he thought, “this guy is super ambitious.”

“And he did it,” Horne said this past week, “and I’m very proud of him.” The ambition Horne heard years ago has led to an impressive career path. Fitzgerald, now 44, moved on from Philly to become the first African-American police chief in the Houston suburb of Missouri City, Texas, and the first African-American police chief in Allentown, Pennsylvania’s third-largest city. Now he is one of two finalists for the police chief job in a Wichita, a city of more than 382,000. Terri Moses, a former Wichita deputy police chief, is the other finalist.

Fitzgerald stresses that he got inspiration from David Fitzgerald Sr., his “stern” and “proud” grandfather who raised him in the blue collar, predominantly African-American neighborhood of Southwest Philadelphia. It is a place of aged, brick, row houses with flat roofs and steep stairs leading to porches. Fitzgerald grew up in one of those homes.

‘My dad’

Joel Fitzgerald viewed his grandfather as his father, so much so that he calls him “my dad.” Joel became his grandparents’ fifth child. Lung cancer should have killed the elder Fitzgerald in the 1970s, a few years after Joel was born. But David Fitzgerald lived three more decades even though he had lost one entire lung and part of another to cancer. Spinal damage forced his 6-foot-4 frame to use crutches and eventually a wheelchair.

Even on the most frigid Philly mornings, he opened his dry-cleaning store and started up the boiler to get the pressing machines ready. Twice he got robbed in front of his business. The thugs knocked him down, splattering coins onto the ground.

So when Joel Fitzgerald was logging long hours as a police officer and laboring to get advanced degrees while also being a husband and father, he couldn’t feel put-upon.

He still looks at this way: “So who am I to complain when I have school work to do … when my dad was out there in a blizzard opening the cleaners six days a week.” His grandfather never took a vacation.

He credits his grandmother, Dorothy Fitzgerald, now 86, with helping her husband all along. She was the one who started the work day by helping her physically challenged husband get out of bed.

‘Never had a bad day’

Keith Morris, an assistant police chief in Allentown, said Joel Fitzgerald has a catchphrase that personifies him: “I’ve never had a bad day in my life.”

The optimism is part of Fitzgerald’s perseverance, said Kevin Bethel, the deputy police commissioner who runs Philly’s patrol operations. A police chief has to be convincing, Bethel said.

“I very rarely let my men and women see me down,” Bethel said. “Even in the … darkest times, you have to rise above it, because as you go, they go. And that’s what Joel has.”

Growing up, Bethel lived across the street from the Fitzgeralds and worked for the family’s dry-cleaning business as a teen and young man. The elder Fitzgerald was Bethel’s godfather. “Everything I am today is because of him,” Bethel said.

At the family business, Joel Fitzgerald worked the cash register and learned to press, dry clean and deliver clothes. If you make a mistake, you can ruin someone’s clothes, which costs money. “My dad was very old-school,” Joel Fitzgerald said. David Fitzgerald required his workers to inspect clothes by hand so they could be spot-cleaned, if needed. If you miss a stain, it can get pressed in. So you catch the spot the first time around.

To Joel Fitzgerald, that kind of attention to detail translated to careful work as a police officer.

At the dry-cleaning store, some of Joel’s coworkers were ex-convicts who benefited from the structure his grandfather imposed. Joel Fitzgerald learned from that exposure that someone who had committed a terrible crime could still find a place in society.

As an officer, there’s a time to be aggressive and make arrests and a time to be gentler with what is known as “community policing,” which is “problem-solving and not just passing the problem on,” he said.

His career path

Most of Fitzgerald’s career – the first 18 years – has been with the Philadelphia Police Department. He ended up as a commanding officer of the city’s “most prestigious narcotics unit,” he said in his resume. “I was responsible for 69 officers … assigned to federal, state, and local task forces.”

One case he helped pursue was a doctor accused of being a “pill mill” – someone illegally dispensing pain meds.

It took a “leap of faith,” he said, to give up his job security and take his family from his hometown to the Houston area for the police chief job in Missouri City, Texas, a growing city of roughly 70,000, where he served from 2009 to 2013. In 2010, he received an award from the NAACP for his community service in Missouri City. African-Americans make up the biggest percentage of Missouri City’s population – 40 percent, said Mayor Pro Tem Don Smith.

“I’m sorry we lost him,” Smith said.

Fitzgerald was innovative, putting police on bicycles in neighborhoods and establishing a mini-police station in an area that needed one, and Fitzgerald seemed comfortable as a keynote speaker or out on the street talking one-on-one, Smith said.

Fitzgerald has been police chief in Allentown, within a 50-minute drive of his hometown, Philly, since December 2013. Morris, the assistant police chief there who also was a finalist for the job that Fitzgerald got, says Fitzgerald came to the department when it was down in ranks because of retirements and at a time of increasing demands for services by the department. The city had gone through an economic resurgence and major development.

Fitzgerald has helped the department adopt the use of body cameras and has enhanced its use of technology by, for example, giving officers new software so they would have real-time data, Morris said.

Fitzgerald established a youth police academy, where kids could interact with officers. He got to know his officers by coming in on different shifts and meeting individually with everyone.

That “went a long way” with the department’s officers, whose ranks now stand at around 211, Morris said.

“The guy always has a smile on his face” – and it’s genuine, Morris said.

This story was originally published August 29, 2015 at 4:47 PM with the headline "Joel Fitzgerald, police chief finalist: had an ambition that began years ago."