Alvarado Police Jail Inmate Search

The Alvarado city jail was there after the Civil War, but the citizens were not wanting to keep dealing with the violent criminals. In 1869, the citizens waited for Benjamin Bickerstaff and Josiah Thompson to come back to town. Bickerstaff was a wanted man in Arkansas. Thompson was a fellow Confederate veteran. The two had terrorized the northeast part of Texas. They had kill freedmen, Union sympathizers, and federal troops. They had come to Alvarado at the beginning of spring and took to drinking. The men had caused fear wherever they went. The citizens put an end to it April 5, 1869.

After the attack, the group went to Waxahachie and got a lawyer. They then turned themselves into the city jail to show they were not trying to be lawless themselves. There is no record of any of them being convicted. Instead, they received the reward for Bickerstaff and were able to build the city's first public school. Over the next few years, the city police had to put many of the violent criminals in the ground, instead of the jail because they did not want to deal with the citizens.

In 1878, to combat what they still saw as an issue, the citizens formed the Alvarado Mutual Protection Association. They took on the criminals that were too much for the local police. They brought any people they could to the jail but wanted the criminals to know they would not be terrorized. The Association took care of the crime problem. The city would see the usual crime associated with the west, but they kept the worst away from their town.

One thing the citizens were able to do was to build a large jail and town hall in the mid 1880s. The building was replaced in the 1920s.

In recent years, the Alvarado police had to arrest on of their own when he let a friend know he was under investigation for drugs. Brent Dickey ended up in federal court for his abuse of power. He had been a member of a Johnson County task force to deal with drugs.