Police Chief Chronicles: Timmy 2.0

OPINION — Jim Hughes was the first businessman I met in San Angelo when I arrived in late 2004. I met Hughes at his office in downtown off Twohig Avenue. He traded agricultural commodities and was very plugged into what was going on in San Angelo. He told me he had just lost an election for mayor against J.W. Lown and was still somewhat in disbelief. Despite Hughes having the support of the Good Ol' Boys, Lown had out-hustled him.

The year 2004 was unique for San Angelo. The voters had not only elected a 20-something-year-old mayor in Lown, but they had also elected a 34-year-old named Tim Vasquez as police chief. The feeling among the electorate must have been of security, and voters were comfortable enough to try new things — shiney new things. Then-Police Chief Joe Gibson had been defeated in the 2004 general election, and Vasquez faced Steve Mida in the runoff. Vasquez won.

Like Lown, Vasquez was a shiny new object compared to the dull, old lawman Gibson. He was young with dashing good looks, energizing, and presented himself with a large amount of charisma.

Vasquez’s pitch was that the police department needed more transparency. He promised to have an open door with the public.

The police department was, at the time, running under the “old ways,” Vasquez told me years ago. He wanted to modernize its approach to fighting crime. He frequently used the phrase “community policing,” as in placing a friendly face on an organization known for its cruelty. This was between the eras where both President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama adopted “community policing” as a federal policy during their administrations.

Insofar as Vasquez, or for our current race, candidate Travis Griffith, have defined what “community policing” is to them, which is not much at all, we can glean some idea from Griffith’s utterances of what he means. He states he will mother drug addicts by diverting them from jail and instead sending them to generally under-resourced nonprofit organizations such as the Alcohol & Drug Awareness Center for the Concho Valley and reduce drug use by 20 percent, thus saving taxpayer money due to a promise of a lower crime rate. Another way to state this is managing drug problems will reduce serious crime. Griffith has also suggested that police can foster closer relationships with residents to facilitate crime solving.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., has panned community policing policies and the money spent on them through the Clinton and Obama years as ineffective. In the 1990s, Clinton offered Delaware a $19.6 million COPS grant to enact community policing by adding to the payrolls of law enforcement agencies that would relieve police officers from desk jobs in order to get them out in the neighborhoods. Despite the money spent and payroll increases, violent crime increased across the state by 35.9 percent. Obama funded $300 million for community policing in the 2010s. Of the five cities in one of the larger Obama-era programs, only one saw a decrease in violent crime. All others witnessed the same crime rates, and one city’s violent crime increased.

The point is, the federal government has spent hundreds of millions attempting to reduce crime with community policing and has seen mixed results. Vasquez, and now Griffith, propose to enact community policing with no added budget. By the end of Vasquez's tenure, among the many issues candidate Frank Carter used against Vasquez was the increase in crime and Carter won.

Griffith's opponent Mike Hernandez proposed a more concrete policy change that doesn’t cost more money. He proposed going after “individuals methodically prowling San Angelo neighborhoods at night, checking car doors and stealing any valuables they can get their hands on.”

The Griffith community policing crowd quickly panned the idea as targeting and unconstitutional, suggesting that a person dressed in a hoodie walking through your neighborhood casing your F-150 in your own driveway for the laptop you left in the front seat overnight should have less scrutiny than a law-abiding citizen and potential victim of the next petty crime. In reality, police do have the constitutional right to request the identity of subjects with whom they come in contact. The subject isn’t always required to identify themselves if no crime is suspected. But failure to identify is, in itself, a form of identity and also a notice that police are watching.

Hernandez also proposed a crowdsourcing effort to collect video footage from privately owned security cameras for crime analysis, a benchmarked plan from Odessa and elsewhere to crack down on uninsured drivers, and a deeper dive into school security.

Speaking of community policing, we went on a ride-along with Chief Frank Carter in 2020, where he talked about the crime rate and the police budget. Carter endorsed Hernandez to carry on the tradition.