Chaplain Dave Fair
Police chaplain · Project co-founder · May 5, 1946–January 7, 2023
Chaplain Dave Fair was a police chaplain, educator, crisis responder, author, former Brownwood city council member and co-founder of the Police Chaplain Project. He began as a radio broadcaster and plastics manager before joining the Brownwood Police Department as chaplain in 1989 and becoming a commissioned peace officer in 1994. Over the decades that followed, he became director of chaplain services and later chaplain emeritus in Brownwood, a senior chaplain with the Texas Department of Public Safety, a reserve deputy, a Texas mental-health officer and a military chaplain and major in the Texas State Guard.
Fair held master-chaplain standing with both the International Conference of Police Chaplains and Chaplain Fellowship Ministries International. He taught police and chaplain training, chaired ICPC education work, served on disaster and critical-incident teams and wrote Mastering Law Enforcement Chaplaincy . He earned doctorates in pastoral counseling and clinical Christian counseling and received the President’s Call to Service Award and formal recognition from the Texas DPS.
His deployments placed him inside major disasters and mass-casualty events: Ground Zero after September 11, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Branch Davidian standoff’s aftermath, the Space Shuttle Columbia debris field, the Fort Hood shooting, Haiti and Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Dolly, Gustav and Ike. The résumé was formidable, but his gifts belonged firmly to the physical world. An iPhone and Facebook could leave him flummoxed. At a death notification, disaster scene or the edge of a water tower, he knew how to be present.
In 2008, together with Phillip LeConte, founded the Police Chaplain Project and built an on-camera archive of interviews with accomplished chaplains.
Fair died on January 7, 2023, at age 76. The project continues as one expression of his legacy. He is remembered by his wife, Karen, three daughters, four granddaughters, the officers and families he served, and the chaplains whose knowledge he helped preserve.
Across his Police Chaplain Project work, Fair helped preserve the practical craft of crisis ministry, the experiences that formed modern law-enforcement chaplaincy and the hard-earned knowledge of the people who practiced it.
“Police chaplains are essential to the spiritual survival of police officers and their families. Yet their hard-earned wisdom is lost with every retirement, with every death. The Police Chaplain Project is changing all that. It’s about leaving it all on the field. We capture what chaplains know and play it forward to empower future generations of chaplains.”
Fair spent his life walking toward difficult scenes that many people instinctively avoid, then helped build an archive so the wisdom found there would not disappear with one generation. His voice remains part of the work he began: grounded, practical and close to the people who needed someone to stay.