Staffing levels have cratered at the Pilot Point Police Department, with the most recent resignations coming from long-time staff members Lt. Preston Green and Sgt. Justin Hull.
As of Tuesday, there were eight sworn officers on staff in the department, including Chief Angela Mathews, with six on the ground, four of which are on patrol, and two in field training.
“We are in full support of Chief Mathews, everything that she’s doing,” City Manager Britt Lusk said to the crowd at the PointBank Business Breakfast on Wednesday. “We support our police department, our public safety. … We are safe in Pilot Point, despite what you’re going to read.”
There will be new officers selected from the at least 29 applications to fill the nine vacancies on the force.
“We do have several applicants right now, and we are within the next couple of weeks also going to be holding interviews and interview boards,” Lusk said.
Mathews came onto the staff in January, following the tenure of Interim Chief Charles “Chuck” Kimball, who was her chief at the Killeen Police Department.
There have been 10 resigna- tions since March, including Sgt. Madison Loughry, Officer Shane Cole and Officer A.J. Cartwright.
“In my opinion, it’s not about leadership, it’s about alignment,” Lusk said.
Not all listed leadership issues as their reason for leaving, but some have.
“A couple of them left during investigations,” Lusk said. “There was one that was not—a couple of them left during training. There’s a multitude of reasons that they left.”
The only one to submit a letter of resignation was Hull.
Two to three of those resignations came after an anonymous email was sent to the Pilot Point mayor, City Council and The Post-Signal.
The letter cited concerns about Mathews’ behavior toward the staff and the accompanying decline in morale, which the letter claims drove the resignations.
“I am not aware of any public outbursts,” Lusk said. “We had formal complaints about the one incident that occurred, but it was not a public outburst. I believe the letter talks about investigations that were unfounded and that was a result of the one incident that we are aware of.”
The letter also calls Lusk’s leadership into question, which was a touchstone issue when complaints were filed against previous Pilot Point PD Chief Rex Marks.
Marks, Kimball and Mathews were selected during Lusk’s tenure at the city.
The letter also alleges that Mathews decided to eliminate the Criminal Investigations Division, which Lusk said “was never actually disbanded.”
“Chief Kimball promoted Madison Loughry to a patrol sergeant, which took her out of CID fulltime and put her as a patrol sergeant at that point, so that would have been prior to Chief Mathews,” Lusk said. “When she was promoted, at that point, it put the CID responsibilities on a patrol sergeant and it was to better address our staffing needs at the time. That was the model that Chief Mathews was running with.”
In Hull’s resignation letter, he did not mention Mathews by name, but he did indicate he was concerned about his professional future if he did not tender an immediate resignation.
“This decision did not come lightly, nor did it come easily,” Hull wrote. “I have been with the Pilot Point Police Department since May of 2018 and have developed friendships with several people from the city and surrounding area.”
He spoke of the progression of his career while in Pilot Point, moving from officer up the ranks to sergeant, and said he “couldn’t be prouder of bearing the weight of that responsibility.”
“I understand providing a two-week notice would have been optimal, but at this current moment, the risk did not outweigh the reward,” Hull wrote. “I felt it was necessary to take my future into my own hands and not risk what could be a career ending decision.”
To bridge the time until the Pilot Point staff can sustain its own needs, the Aubrey Police Department has been providing mutual aid to fill the gaps.
Lusk met Tuesday with Aubrey City Manager Charles Kreidler to develop a memorandum of understanding to formalize that plan.
“They might be in an Aubrey car, but we will always have people on patrol,” Lusk said at the breakfast Wednesday morning. “We will always ensure safety; the continuity of that is not going anywhere.”
