San Angelo Police Child Crimes Investigator Reflects on 28-Year Career

Detective Brian Elkins lowered his head and quietly apologized as he took a moment to hold his composure. After 28 years on the police force and a countless list of cases, the veteran child crimes detective is retiring in little over two weeks.

“I love it,” he said, responding to a question as to why he’s stuck around for nearly a decade after the eligible retirement age. "I really do."

Elkins started at the San Angelo Police Department in 1987, another generation ago in a long line of cops, in a career that trails back to the west coast. Then, new to the community and to policing, Elkins started on patrol but, after five years, the volatile undercurrent of the city’s gang population broke the surface, and the department established a specialized unit to address those problems.

Having grown up in the Los Angeles area, Elkins was deemed one of the most knowledgeable on organized crime, even if he his contact was limited to only standing on the same Los Angeles schoolyard as some of California’s gangsters. Gang violence was new to San Angelo back then, and the city was teeming: brazen acts of violence, death and even threats on police were commonplace.

“From about 1992 to about 1999, I was on the Gang Suppression Unit,” Elkins said. “We had horrible gangs back then, tons of different gangs. There was probably a shooting or a stabbing or something every weekend, or some type of drive-by or something.”

Many of the former members of the gang unit still work with the San Angelo Police Department and have gone on to hold places on the SWAT team, Traffic Division and in the Criminal Investigations Division. Elkins took his knowledge to the latter, joining CID as a detective in ’99, a position he still holds.  

“The gang unit had been working with criminal investigations forever…and it was a pretty easy transfer for me to become a detective,” Elkins said. “Since I’ve been up here, I’ve been in crimes against persons, fraud, domestic violence, culminating in what I am now. Which is, I’ve been in crimes against children for about seven years. I’ve done a little bit of everything in the police department, only because I love it.”

Having grown up in southern California, Elkins followed his father to San Angelo in the ‘80s, who had been brought to the quiet west Texas town by a car thief and the city’s tiny airport.

“My father was a policeman out in Long Beach, California. He did an extradition of a guy who was in a car stealing ring up there; my dad was working the auto theft division up there in Long Beach. He came to pick the guy up—I don’t know the whole story on it, for some reason he wasn’t ready—so the closest airport to fly into was in San Angelo because they had to go to Sonora or Junction, one of those. He ended up staying here a few days, and he loved it here.”

Elkins visited his father in San Angelo and was drawn to the city’s manageable size, the higher job prospects and quiet sampling of everything one needs in a town without the overbearing rush and roar of a pricey metro.

“In any city, you know the Italian restaurant you want to go to, the theater, the Mexican food restaurant,” Elkins said. “So in Los Angeles, I was only leaving like a six-mile perimeter. You don’t go to the beach all the time; you don’t go to the mountains all the time, because it’s there. So I thought, ‘why am I spending all this money out here in California when I can live there cheaper and get a better job?’ So I moved to Texas.”

In California, Elkins had been a furniture buyer for furniture stores, purchasing, for example, 70 couches and hoping the styles he’d selected would be successful on the market. It was a high-pressure job, he said, joking that he’d “lost my hair and had an ulcer by 23”. And he wanted out.

“I came from a long line of cop families—my relatives were all cops, I had no choice in the matter,” Elkins said. “I wanted to be a doctor, but they said, ‘no, be a cop’. I’ve had a total of four jobs in my life.”

Elkins said he’s had no regrets regarding his choice to move to San Angelo or his decision to join the police department. In fact, the 28-year officer has been eligible for retirement for the past eight years, an option he’s put off out of love for the job.

Joining the department at a time when cruisers were outfitted with little more than a radio and a couple of buttons for lights and sirens, Elkins has seen police work morph and evolve into its modern form with technological advancements, new ideas and generational continuance. What’s remained the same, he said, is the crime.

“The laws are different,” he noted. “There’s not a lot of change in policing. The crimes are all the same; the people are all the same. I think what’s funny now is the people I was dealing with and seeing, now their kids and their grandkids are involved in crime. It’s just a continuing cycle.”

When Elkins moved into child crimes, he was anticipating a temporary assignment. His children were 12 and 17—old enough that he was able to keep the stories he was hearing from penetrating too deeply—and he’d been told he’d just be working the division for a couple of months until they were able to find someone else.

“That couple of months has stretched into almost eight years now,” Elkins laughed. “I keep wondering when my replacement is going to get here so I don’t have to do this anymore.”

Child crimes is one of the most difficult positions to fill, officers agree. CID Sergeant Rusty Herndon has been supervising Elkins for eight years and applauds his ability to dissect his emotion from the case in order to effectively investigate. 

“These are, in my opinion, the most difficult cases to work,” Herndon said. “Anytime you see a young, small, innocent child that has been physically and/or sexually abused, you want the best going after the criminal.  You want that detective to be cool and calm when he is sitting in the same room with the person that has taken the innocence of a child and abused them in some horrific manner.  Then asking him about the crime they have committed in hopes of getting a confession, while suppressing your feelings of anger. Detective Elkins is that person.”

The majority of cases involving children are initiated at daycare or school, particularly at the beginning of the fall semester when children return to the classroom and are excited to tell others how they spent their summers. The all-time high for open cases, however, came in April 2014, when there were 170 cases of physical, mental, sexual or neglectful child abuse reported to Child Protective Services (CPS) and the SAPD.

Once state agencies receive reports, they investigate the claims and pass their findings off to police. Elkins and another detective, Bobby Elrod, are the only two SAPD officers working child crimes and are tasked with sifting through every page and making a determination on what cases to pursue.

On average, CPS turns over some 130-140 cases per month, but another 30 or so are reported directly to the police department or officers.

“It’s an astronomical number of cases that come in on abused kids,” Elkins said.  “A percentage of those will be kicked out because either the allegations are not complete, or they’re old, or there’s no evidence to back it up criminally. It’s kind of like the triage system: We look at the worst; the worst goes first, and we do it that way.

With cases continually pouring in, Elkins has narrowed his open file stack down to six once or twice in the past seven years, he said, only to have 20 more dropped on his desk the next day. The never-ending flow of work isn’t overwhelming, he said, rather the repetitive nature of some of them.

“[The hardest part is] working a case and you know at some point in time that the law is written that this family has to be put back together, and the nagging thing in the back of your head knowing, ‘this is probably going to happen again, maybe not next month, but maybe two years from now…and you’re just going to have to open it again,” Elkins said. “You have children that are victims at age 2 and then at age 5 and then at age 9. You see the names over and over again.”

 At the end of August, Elkins is retiring from the San Angelo Police Department and moving over to the Tom Green County Courthouse, where he will work as a bailiff in Judge Tom Gossett’s court. The decision to retire was a difficult move

“I tried to be retired,” Elkins admitted. “I did a ‘stay vacation’…you just stay at home and do nothing. After day three, I ran out of things to do at the house. I have to be somewhat busy; I have to be doing something or I go stir crazy…How much golf can you play? There’s only so many times you can sandpaper the trees and wax the dogs, you know. I just couldn’t do it. [The bailiff position] came around, and it was an opening and I decided to jump on it.”

In honor of his many years of service with the San Angelo Police Department, Elkins was nominated the Officer of the Month for August.

“Det. Elkins is truly a credit to the San Angelo Police Department, citizens of San Angelo and the young children he has fought to protect from future incidents of crime, and putting the criminal away for a long time,” Sergeant Herndon said. “He will be truly missed by all of us.  It has been my pleasure in working with him these past eight years.”