Thread by @ElectRyanDorsey

Joel Fitzgerald is a corner-clearing, broken windows devotee. It’s what he knows and believes in.

Joel Fitzgerald lacks adequate respect for the divide between the people and BPD, and the resistance to change within BPD. He also lacks experience leading in a place with these problems, or a department of this size.

Joel Fitzgerald refused to even loosely define success or a timeline for achievement when I asked him to. He laughed, shrugged, and told me to google him.

The three points above are takeaways based on my direct interactions with him.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

I provided copies of this letter to him and the Mayor five weeks ago and have received no response from either.

baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/…

I want to go deeper on these points. The only one I asked about was success. The other two were brought up by him voluntarily. My staff was with me in the meeting so we could all get a sense about him, and invited them to ask whatever they wanted.

One of my staff members asked about his impression of Baltimore so far, given his extremely little experience here. That’s when he began talking about clearing corners and went into broken windows.

The conversation came to the divide between police and community. He said he thought it was not nearly as bad as people make it out to be, a vocal minority expressing outlier views that media gives attention to. My staff and I disagreed. He offered no further insight.

He talked about how sometimes the best thing to do is to call an emergency “back the blue” rally, and that when he calls to 20,000 people in Ft. Worth, 50,000 show up. He offered this in response to questions about police/community relations.

When questioned about the department culture having great inertia, resistant to change, his actual words were, “They just don’t know what it’s like when I come to town.” It struck me like something John Wayne would say.

I asked others who met with him how their meetings had gone. The response that most stuck out to me was, “I expected he would be pretty bad. I was shocked though by just how incredibly bad he actually was.”