Officer Sara Straten has returned to the role of LGBT liaison.

Officer Sara Straten returns to the role of FWPD’s LGBT liaison, which she originated in the wake of the Rainbow Lounge raid

Tammye Nash | Managing Editor
nash@dallasvoice.com

The summer of 2009 was typical of North Texas, with hot, humid days that made most people want to stay inside under the air conditioner. But in Fort Worth, it was the police department, especially relatively new Chief Jeff Halstead, that was feeling the real heat. And no amount of air conditioning would help.

It had all started on June 28, at the Rainbow Lounge, when a few Fort Worth PD officers had helped two agents with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission conduct what they called a bar check, but what the folks in the bar that night said was nothing less than a raid.
People were arrested, handcuffed and hauled to jail. One of the men arrested, Chad Gibson, was thrown to the floor and handcuffed, incurring a head injury that left him with permanent brain damage.

And it all happened on the 40th anniversary of the raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York City — the event known as the birth of the modern gay rights movement, and the reason we celebrate June as LGBT Pride Month each year.

The response from the LGBT community was immediate and overwhelming. And Halstead and his department were dead center of the storm. That’s when Officer Sara Straten, then a 17-year veteran of FWPD, volunteered to step into the storm as the department’s first liaison to the LGBT community.

Although she quickly realized that the position might be more tempestuous than she had known — “Maybe if I had read all the [press surrounding the Rainbow Lounge incident] online first, I wouldn’t have volunteered,” Straten told Dallas Voice in a July 20, 2009 interview, her first interaction with the media as liaison — Straten quickly grew into her new role and as liaison, helped turn what started as a contentious, angry relationship between the community and the police into a close, mutually beneficial bond.

Straten remained as liaison for a little more than two years before handing the job off to Officer Kellie Whitehead in late 2011. Now, almost seven years later, Straten is back, ready to take up the reins as the community’s contact on the police force once again.
During a recent interview to talk about her new-again-role as liaison, Straten talked about those tumultuous days-weeks-months after the raid. She said that when she heard Halstead was looking for an LGBT liaison officer, she sent an email to volunteer.

“I told him that I was openly gay, that I [at the time] attended the biggest gay church in town [Celebration Community Church] and that I worked part-time at [Best Friends, at the time the largest LGBT bar in town],” she said. And when she met with Halstead, she said, she could see that he truly wanted to reach out to the community and create a better relationship. So when he offered her the position, she readily accepted.

“I had no idea what I had signed up for!” she said. “Times have changed now. But at first, it was really rough. Everything just got so busy so fast.”

Straten stayed in the liaison position for about two-and-a-half years, but as the job transitioned for a part-time gig into more of a full-time role in the department’s public information office, she said, she began to “miss doing police work” more and more.

So Straten left the liaison role to Whitehead and transferred to the Narcotics Division. It was a whole new world.

“I had just spent the last two-and-a-half-years dealing with the media and being ‘on the record’ every day, all day, and then I switched to Narcotics where I was totally off the record,” she said.

During her time with Narcotics, Straten also trained and worked as a hostage negotiator. And while the high drama “TV cop show” type situations are relatively rare in Fort Worth, the hostage negotiators are always busy, she said, explaining that “any time SWAT is called out, the negotiators are called out. They are called out in all kinds of situations.”

Straten stayed in the Narcotics Division for about five years. But during that time, just as the city and the department were changing, so was her life. She adopted two sons and she got married, inheriting older children and, now, even a grandchild. And the 10 a.m.-to-3 a.m. shifts, and the two-weeks-on-call responsibilities as a negotiator began to wear on her.

“By that time, I had been on the force for 25 years. I was tired, and my kids had become teenagers with a lot of activities going on,” she said. “We [she and wife Debra Straten] are those moms who are at every game, every event, dragging the big cooler with snacks for everybody behind us. I needed regular hours, Monday through Friday, so I could be there for my family.”

Plus, she continued, “ I wanted to do something positive.” Transferring in 2016 to become a school resource officer gave her that chance.

Through the years, liaison officers had come and gone. Tracey Knight replaced Whitehead, then Kathy Jones replaced Knight. When Jones retired, another officer stepped in for a short time, but the position had been vacant for awhile when Straten decided to take the job again.

“Every time the position was vacant, somebody would ask me if I was going to do it again. I had seen Chief [Joel] Fitzgerald [named chief in September 2015] a couple of times and he asked me about it. But I was still in Narcotics and still having fun.”

Then after she switched to being a school resource office, Straten said, she knew she would have the time to be liaison, but at the same time, she didn’t want to leave the SRO work to go to the public information office, where the liaison job had been living.

“PIO is a scary gig. When you are in that office, you are the face of the department and you have to constantly watch every word you say. Dealing with the media is a real chess match, and it isn’t easy. You have to WANT to be in the PIO; you have to have a talent for it to do it well,” she said.

But when she found out that she could take the liaison position and remain as an SRO, instead of transferring to the PIO, Straten said she decided to apply. And she is glad she did.

“Back when it all started, it was a tough time. But Chief Halstead was invested to making this work, in making a better relationship with the LGBT community and in the role of the liaison,” she recalled.

Today, she said, “Chief Fitzgerald is just as committed to this as Halstead was. I believe he genuinely wants to keep this door [between the police department and the LGBT community] open, to not let it close.

“Today, we are in a much better place,” she continued. “There is a younger generation out there now and for them, being gay is not ‘out of the norm.’ Sure, there are still haters out there, but overall, society has evolved. Our community and our police department have evolved, too.

“I want our community to know that I am here, that they can reach out to me for help. That’s why I am here.”

Fort Worth Police Department LGBT Liaison Officer Sara Straten can be reached by phone at 817-925-9355 or by email at Sara.Straten@fortworthtexas.gov.