Latest / Blue Grit Podcast: The Voice of Texas Law Enforcement / #032- "The Godfathers"

Transcript

#032- "The Godfathers" · Blue Grit Podcast: The Voice of Texas Law Enforcement

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I mean, I'll say this, I'll say it here and I've said it many times In the history of the state of Texas, no chiefs association, sheriff's association, constable association has ever filed a bill to improve the police profession.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Not to this day.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Everything you see came from the unions driven by officers and local associations.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Welcome back Blue Grit family.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, tyler Owen and Clint McNeer.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Hey, we did it good this time.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: We did it.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: Welcome back you guys.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: Hit that subscribe button for we delve or dive.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: We're not really sure what we're going to do today.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: We've got some pretty good guests today Our big bosses in.
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: Welcome Kevin.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: Thank you sir, the man, the myth, the legend, tmp executive director and Iran, the Lord.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the Blue Grit podcast.
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: I'm glad to be here.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
• 0:51
  Speaker 4: It's been a cool episode.
• 0:52
  Speaker 4: We were trying to figure out how to condense this down into about 50, 60, 70 minutes and when you have two guys that have literally decades and decades and decades of labor history, understand prior labor history and where it all is, that's going to be a short, compacted.
• 1:11
  Speaker 4: We're going to do it like auctioneers.
• 1:13
  Speaker 4: But everybody knows Kevin.
• 1:16
  Speaker 4: He's been around.
• 1:17
  Speaker 4: He's executive director of TMP for a long time, been involved with the labor movement for a long time.
• 1:23
  Speaker 4: Ron DeLorde if folks don't know him, who's Ron?
• 1:27
  Speaker 4: Where'd you grow?
• 1:27
  Speaker 4: I think you guys both grew up.
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: Golden Triangle, not far from each other.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: He's from the rich side of the Nature's River.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: I'm from the horse side, and that's defined by our house, was on a foundation, not upon peers, I was a beer, and beans.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: Y'all had sightings.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: What you're saying?
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: He was from Orange.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: I was from upscale Groves.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: My dad was a Union bricklayer.
• 1:51
  Speaker 3: Oh, that was a Union truck driver.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Well, if you weren't Union, you weren't working in the trying.
• 1:58
  Speaker 4: So we just we just had a great point.
• 2:00
  Speaker 4: That just dawned on me because both of you guys have been involved in labor for a long time and I've never.
• 2:05
  Speaker 4: I was the question, one of the first questions in the episode shot now, because that was going to be the biggest question I wanted to ask.
• 2:11
  Speaker 4: Y'all just answered it.
• 2:12
  Speaker 4: Both of y'all grew up in a labor home.
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: You'd be surprised how many of us in the law enforcement labor movement in Texas are from the Golden Triangle.
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: It's because it is heavy petrochemical.
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: It's the old lumber industry down there, meat packing class it's.
• 2:30
  Speaker 3: It's always been union unionized down there.
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:33
  Speaker 4: Well, that's what?
• 2:34
  Speaker 4: That's a wrap.
• 2:34
  Speaker 4: They both grew up in a labor home and that's a wrap.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: We can we can have it here.
• 2:39
  Speaker 4: Explanation given.
• 2:40
  Speaker 4: So grew up in Groves, family and law enforcement.
• 2:45
  Speaker 4: What got you into law enforcement?
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: Well, like a lot of people my dad had in my later father-in-law had mixed feelings about police because of the picket lines, because the big refineries mostly were on strike, you know, every three or four years.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: So the local police, usually poor, author or Beaumont would be out there on the picket lines.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: And so when I wanted to get on the Houston police department when I was 19, nobody in my family ever been in policing and my dad taught me out of staying college.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: I was a union brickler apprentice but I really just worked part time and so you could get on Houston at 19, go on the street at 20, even though you couldn't buy your pistol legally, or bullets, or bullets under federal law.
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: Somebody else had to because I started at 19.
• 3:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, my brother had to go by my bullets.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: That's, that's correct.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: So Houston would take you.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: But my dad taught me out of it and I was going to Lamar and I don't know what working staff, we just working part time, going to school.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: And one of my guys in the paternity came in and a Beaumont police uniform and I said I didn't know.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: He said, oh yeah, you can work, shift work and go to school today.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: So on my 21st birthday in 1969, january 21st, they had a civil service.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: This is if it had fell the day before, who knows.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: But poor author was paying 438 a month and Beaumont had just had a pay raise to five fifty.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: Now I don't know what you can do with five.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of money.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: So I took the test, they hired me, a couple of little polygraph I was about to interview and he said that the old police station.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: But go upstairs, there's a pile of uniforms up there.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: Go through and get this many pants, shirts and stuff and go down and get yourself a pistol.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: I never fired a pistol.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: I bought an old MNP 38, the old traditional police pistol, and I showed up at work and I noticed all these people were laughing.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Well, I didn't know.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: You had to have keepers on there, you know, and so I learned the first day.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: I was hit, oh Lord, and he put me with an old sergeant who your gun bill was spinning around.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, falling down you know and it's always says you know you can get keepers on there and I didn't know about handcuffs.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: I mean they didn't give you anything.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: No, wood night stick, velcro Hadn't been there was no.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: And so they rode with this old sergeant Max Katesh, who, at the time God had probably been on since World War Two.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: And you'll have cars right, Two cars, two man cars no air conditioning, no good time radio and a fleet of ponies.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: No AC and probably three no, yeah, yeah, it was, there was nothing.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: And he kept talking about this.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Miranda had ruined policing and he was going to retire, but I didn't know who Miranda was, so I didn't want to say.
• 5:52
  Speaker 4: Does he work here?
• 5:53
  Speaker 4: I don't know.
• 5:54
  Speaker 4: Is that the chief?
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: I didn't know and I'm riding around.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: So I said what is it?
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Well, that's that new Miranda decision.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Then they put me with a training officer and I went to work.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: I had no training, never fired a pistol, no Academy, no Academy, nothing, nothing.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: So he called me in and said here's the new penal code had come out in 1969, I guess, and had some change.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: That read this and didn't go out there.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: And about 18 months later Tico was formed, about 69, but it wasn't mandatory and they were giving everybody a year to.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: So finally they said excuse me, you got to go to this one month school.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: The state requires it.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: Now they were people in there have 35, 40 years of service.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: You know they were dropping going to the Academy.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: Sit there.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: An old trooper was an instructor.
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: That's it.
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: 160 hours, that's it.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: It was the first no gun shooting, no high speed driving.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: An old trooper who had retired was teaching the course and so when I finished I was there.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: I had my life 18 months later working on the street.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: But it was a different world and you know I don't.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: You know I guess you grew up in the south, and quickly southeast Texas.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: I grew up in a segregated world.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: My high schools had African American schools, were separate football teams, school districts In the police department only had two black officers one detective working murders in the black part of town and one patrolman both of whom later retired, who just served warrants for the court in the black part of town, with no women and only two black officers.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: And that was 1969.
• 7:48
  Speaker 4: How quick after you started your police career did you know that police labor, police association business?
• 7:55
  Speaker 4: How quick did you know that that was something that you wanted to be involved in?
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Well, I guess and I like to say it came from growing up my grandfather was a union brick layer, my dad was a bricklayer in the union.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: Everybody we knew was in a union.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: We know anyone, unless you were in management.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: And when I got on the police department in 1970, I got on the board.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: It was a Beaumont municipal police association coming off the TMPA names Beaumont Baytown, had municipal in there and I was on the board and an officer got in trouble over arresting a drunk and he pulled him over and laid him in the backseat of the car.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: Someone saw it in the plane and that back then it imagine you had so-so chief fired him.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: So I was complaining to some people about that and they said the chief wants to see you.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: It was a Willie Bauer.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: He had been there since 1938.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: So he calls me in and the assistant chief and he was eating sunflower seeds and spitting in his cup and he goes boy, look around this room.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: Do you see anybody in here but us?
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: No, sir, if you say one more word you're fired.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: I said I understand.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: I left and started applying for jobs and shortly after that I went to Mesquite.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: I understood perfectly well there wasn't going to be any union.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: Talking around the mobile, please, sir.
• 9:27
  Speaker 4: My future is clear to me I understand chief.
• 9:29
  Speaker 4: Thank you, Sealer so you grew up in a union house.
• 9:33
  Speaker 4: Any family and law enforcement?
• 9:35
  Speaker 4: Oh yeah.
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: I had an older brother, brother-in-law, cousin, all worked for the Orange County Sheriff's Department when I was in high school and they all left about the same time and went to work for this place called Baytown that I had never heard of.
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: And I graduated from high school and I did a year at LaMaur University while I was working at the Better Business Bureau.
• 9:57
  Speaker 3: And about the time I was finishing that freshman year, my brother, who had moved to Baytown, called me.
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: He was going through a divorce and he was getting custody of his son and he said he called me and said hey, how would you like to move in with me and help me out with my son?
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: And I said, well, I need a job and I want to go to school.
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: And at first he hooked him up with a security company.
• 10:22
  Speaker 3: It was owned by a former Baytown cop and I went to work there and within six months I went down and took the test and got hired with the police department.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: So I started about 10 years after Ron did, maybe nine or 10 years, but my academy was only 240 hours and they still had a year to send you to the academy.
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: They could hire you and put you out on the street with no training, no FTO, no nothing.
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: And they had a year to put you through the academy.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: And I can tell you when that changed In the mid-80s, I went to Dick Brown, who Kevin knows was the time probably one of the most powerful.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: He was the head of the Texas Municipal League, their lobbyist.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: And I went to Dick and I said, dick, 50 something percent of all the police in Texas were working for about time, about 50,000 hours.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: They were working for at least 12 months before they would send them to school.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: And they of course didn't like you, they didn't want to spend the money, they'd get rid of you.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: And Dick said, well, that's just not right.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: I said, well, I'm going to file a bill that'll make them do it.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: This is about 85 or so.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: And he said, well, I'm not going to get in your way.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: Well, of course, all the chiefs showed up, the sheriffs, the constables.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: We can't do this, we can't be sending people to school.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: They got the bill passed but had to give them another year, almost two years, for it to take effect, like it passed in 85.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: They had till 87.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: And from that point forward nobody could go to work and basically it was a simple deal If somebody can walk off the street and take your job, your job is worthless.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: And that's what was happening to nursing.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: It was happening to teachers.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: People could walk in, get a temporary license.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: That's what's happening in jails right now, in county jails.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: That shouldn't happen but it is.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: So people come in, get a temporary license and go to work, have no training.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: So I said, well, let's just be licensed.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: And I like the concept.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: We're, in a few states, one of the first states to require licensing, because the minute we turn that tap off and make it difficult to get in, the quality of people goes up, what people have to pay to get them.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: And you'll also notice, when we started doing that, it started all of the rating of people saying well, we're looking for licensed officers, isn't it which we have today?
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: So anyway, that's what happened, because if they left their own volition we wouldn't have done any of that thing at that at the time.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: And I'll say this and I'll say it here and I've said it many times In the history of the state of Texas, no chiefs association, sheriff's association, constable association has ever filed a bill to improve the police profession.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: Not to this day.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: Everything you see came from the unions driven by officers in local associations who came to the capital and said we got to have drug testing.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: We got to have psychological testing.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: I won't name the county, but you know Polygraphs Huh.
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: Polygraphs, polygraphs, lie detector.
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: Yes, all the hiring standards, all the training standards, all the HIN servicestuff came from the unions, the association the lodges, whatever you want to call them in your part of the state.
• 13:36
  Speaker 4: That is a huge point that I hope our listeners and it's still true to this day.
• 13:40
  Speaker 4: To the.
• 13:41
  Speaker 3: Ron's exactly right.
• 13:42
  Speaker 3: The chief's association is beholding to TML, the sheriff's association is beholding to the Texas Association of Counties.
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: They want to hold costs down.
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: We still, to this day and you've heard me testify to it several times we still try to do law enforcement on the economy plan in the state, and it's time to stop.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: It's time to double down.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: I just saw a city the other day they were going to start removing they call it lowering standard, but I'll just say the taking out aptitude test, taking out certain requirements.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: I would double down now.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: Now, at this moment when we're in a crisis of who wants to be a policeman, double down, raise standards.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: It will drive the cost up, but the quality will be so much better.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: We can't fill the gap with lesser qualified people.
• 14:33
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I've told people a dozen times.
• 14:36
  Speaker 4: If there's not a solution at some point the person showing up to your house when you call 911, you might not want them coming in your house.
• 14:44
  Speaker 4: But if you want to lower standards, that's something you can face down the road, absolutely.
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: Right now we've got this recruiting slash retention crisis that's been going on now for years, and that's what people need to understand.
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: I saw a flyer this morning about a city that has eliminated the aptitude test as part of their hiring process altogether, and the union is screaming about it because they've already lowered their standards to the point that the people they've got applying to be cops are the exact people you don't want being cops.
• 15:19
  Speaker 4: If you have a poll, show up.
• 15:20
  Speaker 4: We'll have a test on Saturday.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: Well, that's what TDC does, sad to them.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you just a quick story.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: When I was doing lobbying in the 80s, there was a gap where an original T-Cole commission only applied to officers that were in 2.12, the co-ground station.
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: It's okay to still call it T-Close.
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: It's okay, it's T-Cole.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: I understand you Anyway so the old commission and the Dallas had formed a security force that looked just like Dallas, they had 400 officers and I filed a complaint and they said well, they're not in 2.12.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: They were licensed in one of the board of private investigators with a 10-hour handgun class Strike force, or something, wasn't it?
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: Dallas security.
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: It was the city of Dallas.
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: It was basically their city marshals.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: But they were security guards and not peace officers.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: But they looked the same, had the gun.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: So I filed a complaint with the commission and they said well, we can't do anything.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: So during the session I slipped the bill in in T-Cole.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: It just said 2.12 are any other law.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: Nobody saw it.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: There was 150 categories of police excluded from 2.12.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: Racing commission cemeteries could have police departments, oh you know.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: So they got caught and so I actually had TDC in there too, because we picked up county jails and the director of TDC at the time was one of those days where people could actually work on legislation verbally.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: It wouldn't all run on computers, you know.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: You could go up the last minute.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: They were moving the clock back and so he told me he said I need to talk to you.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: In the hallway I said OK, so I'm going to tell you something.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: I think we ought to be under the commission.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: All of the correction officers, the state correction officers said but I can't do it, I can't fill what I got.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: And this is a story he told me and he said I'm just looking for a guy who has 12 marbles in his pocket and as he walks along the bank, the jail, he takes a marble and puts it in the other pocket.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: When he gets to the end he has a marble, somebody's missing.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: That's what he told me in private and I said OK, fine, take them out.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: And I regret that because today there's so much we could do to help the people who work in the prison system to get those type of standards and reduce this 30-some-odd percent vacancies, but the state doesn't have the will power to do it.
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: So that bill is how the Houston Park Rangers became the Houston Park Police Department.
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: Well, at the time, not part of HPV.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: There were some separate.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: There were some separate things in 212 that said you could have park rangers in the first and you have airport security officers.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: So the first deal when Bill Clinton was two of them for airports.
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: it was one for airports and municipality was more than so many people yeah.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Well, I've the first time I amended the airport security officers to airport police.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: The city of Houston, San Antonio, got the governor of Clements to veto the bill, but later they went in and fixed it.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: But at the time Park Rangers in San Antonio, in Austin, could not make an arrest above a Class C and so over time was you know, I think we have too many decades ago I wanted us to come in and get rid of all what I call second, third and fourth tier.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: I used to always try to kill any state agency trying to get a law enforcement department.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: That's absolutely ridiculous.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: We have a Department of Public Safety.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: If the water department for the state needs security, we'll put your budget and send a trooper over.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: If you need investigators, DPS has them.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: But we didn't.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: And I won't name the senator, but I knocked the bill off of the state health department several times.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: If finally, as you know, they'll call you in and say you're messing with my bill.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: So let us don't think the state Department of Health needs a police department.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: We have state police.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: He says well, I told him I'm going to pass that bill, I need you to leave it alone and since he was not our enemy, I had to leave it alone.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: So those things.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: We have 2,700 police departments Absolutely ridiculous, we don't need.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: Canada has 200 for the whole country.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Australia has eight.
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry I have to correct you there's 2,900 agents.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: Another 2,000 came on.
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: There's 200 that don't have any officers.
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: That has zero commission office.
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: It's a technicality like this.
• 20:08
  Speaker 4: It's ridiculous.
• 20:08
  Speaker 4: Kevin and I were out of state somewhere recently.
• 20:11
  Speaker 4: He was having a conversation with a bunch of out of state people and he quoted the number of law enforcement agencies we have in Texas and there was at least one or two or a handful of other states there and the look on their face because that's the only policing I know is Texas.
• 20:26
  Speaker 4: And when he when he spouted how many law enforcement agencies are in Texas, you could see everybody there.
• 20:33
  Speaker 4: At first I think thought he was just bullshitting or or or or.
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: We are the second largest state in the union.
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: We have more law enforcement agencies than number one, two, three sorry one three, four and five.
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: That's right, bind, it's correct.
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: California, florida, new York and Illinois combined have fewer law enforcement agencies than Texas has alone.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: That's shocking.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: It's a control issue, where every little place with a stop sign thinks they got to have a police force and now all the school districts creating police forces, the water control districts are on police forces the water will just go down to cities like what's the one out in Marble Falls, what's that?
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: It has a city but the Harshoe Bay.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: Harshoe Bay but the police has Harshoe Bay, but down below it's Colorado, lower Colorado River Authority police.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: So we don't need it.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: To me, we can change it.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: In California, why they don't have so many is about 30% of all police departments are contracted out.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: That's because what they have to pay and get so not LA County, riverside, all those have many, many hundreds of agency.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: We should have done that.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: We never created the type of sheriff's departments, except in a few large counties that could do that.
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: So in California, sheriff's deputies make pretty close to what the PD makes and the quality appears to be pretty close.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Well, here you know, we've got what 100 and something.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: Counties hardly have an incorporated town and sheriffs are making 25,000.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: So we never set that up.
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: So if you're, I'm not going to pick on Southside Place, but it's one block, okay, but we let them have a police force, not because they need a police force.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: All of your metropolitan areas could be done in Canada.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: They just came in, of course, and said Montreal's got 34 police departments on here.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: We're going to have one police force you can keep all your cities.
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: All of those are going to Montreal, same with Ontario, the only reason there's a Southside Place is one block, but it's a rich block.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: Yes, Well, I understand we get it, but there's no reason except that a few rich people would do it.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: I came very close back many years ago.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: A very wealthy man he was an old banker wanted to create a Metro police force in Bear County was saying to you, he got the stuff, came out with me.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: We talked about it At the time.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: The deputies didn't bargain.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: They'd create a bargaining form.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: It would later merge in and slowly the sheriff would take care of the courts processing the jail and all the outside policing would be done just like it is in Las Vegas or Dade or Louisville, charlotte.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: When we get the legislature, guess who killed it?
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you TML, no, no.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: Every constable, every elected district clerk, elected tax assessor, all these little nickel-dime positions that in any government would not be elected You'd have.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: The city doesn't have.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: Each of its department has elected.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: The county doesn't need that either.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: That's to keep alive a political machine and have people in parties.
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: The elected county auditor, that's right.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: What's the point?
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: So it would have had a Metro government.
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: It's a constitutional thing.
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: In Texas, our constitution is, when it comes to county government, extremely archaic.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: Well, yes, they have no power whatsoever.
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: It would require some constitutional amendments to do that kind of consolidation that you're talking about.
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: But at that time we would.
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: It would have had to have a corresponding constitutional amendment, but it would have had very similar.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: It's not like we don't have a model and while they're not perfect, you don't need to have these vast unincorporated areas.
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: In Bear County I got noses probably in million people.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: Harris could be two million people living in unincorporated areas.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: That should all be done by one police force.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: We don't need within Dallas County in 300, 400 separate police departments.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: You don't need that.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: There's no unincorporated land left in either one.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: Why not have a metro police and not have 300 chiefs, 300 SWAT teams, 300?
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: I'm just saying it's not going to happen.
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: I just recently found out that precinct five down Harris County precinct five Constables office the largest Constables department in the country.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: That's correct.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: Wow, that came about in a fight with Jack Herd.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: Jack Herd had been the chief.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: Came the sheriff, he got an argument with county commissioners and they started saying, well, fine, we'll just give all your work to those eight Constables.
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: And so it all started just bleeding them off, because Constables office's primary duties was process serving, working for the courts.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: They have a set of duties and so.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: But they had all these large unincorporated gated sub-convisions and stuff and it started to say, well, here here's 500 for you and Herd's successor down in Harris County was okay with the sheriff doing nothing but correct.
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: That's correct and turning all enforcement over to the Constables.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: So they ended up with 1000 member Constables, office, motorcycle, swat teams and started doing all this work and contract work.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: Well, it is what it is.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: We're not going to fix it, so let's focus on not making it worse by lowering the standards anyway.
• 26:14
  Speaker 4: So we're talking about standards in union and association business for our listeners, what everybody thinks of unions back in and you guys grew up with it in the Southern part of the state in North Texas there's no, I was not around unions in any form or fashion.
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: Union is a four letter one.
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 26:35
  Speaker 4: Yeah, seriously, um, but for our listeners and younger listeners, they think of unions, they think of, like you know, in New York or California.
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: AFL CIO the teachers.
• 26:46
  Speaker 4: Jimmy Hoffa and at a time with concrete boots, unions were extremely, entirely incredibly strong.
• 26:56
  Speaker 4: Texas has never is really new to the labor movement and you guys have a ton of experience.
• 27:01
  Speaker 4: But in the grand scheme of American labor, texas is really, really new to that because we're new and along the border, for our listeners.
• 27:13
  Speaker 4: Along the border there's a lot of meat and confer and collective bargaining and um, it's moved to North and even in North Texas there's some contracts now.
• 27:20
  Speaker 4: But you guys have been around a long time specifically in the labor movement.
• 27:24
  Speaker 4: Whoever wants to go first?
• 27:27
  Speaker 4: What?
• 27:27
  Speaker 4: Where do you think it looks like right now of where we are against some of the other movements in this country?
• 27:36
  Speaker 4: And what do you think it looks like moving forward?
• 27:39
  Speaker 4: Our unions struggling or are we getting stronger?
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: I'm like Ron coming on that mostly.
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: I'm going to make this comment, though.
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: Just in the last few years Massachusetts started licensing their peace officers for the first time in their history.
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: That amazed me, Massachusetts being a labor state, they've had police unions back to the 1910s.
• 28:02
  Speaker 4: Probably one of the oldest police departments, I guess, in the country, I think.
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: Boston was the first place where you actually got law enforcement getting organized as labor because of the working conditions they were under.
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: But the fact that Massachusetts took another hundred years to start licensing and commissioning their peace officers, rather than letting every little jurisdiction make those decisions, tells you that Texas is we're not as far behind the curve as you might think.
• 28:25
  Speaker 3: As a matter of fact, we're ahead of a lot of other states when it comes to where we sit.
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: About half of all the peace officers who are employed in Texas are covered by some sort of a bargaining agreement.
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: Right now it's only about a hundred agencies, but it's the hundred biggest agents, except for Falfurius and Pinehurst.
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: There are others outliers, but you know Houston and Dallas is a type of meeting conferred but it is bargaining.
• 28:49
  Speaker 3: Houston, dallas, san Antonio, fort Worth, austin, el Paso, all the way down.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: Arlington Well.
• 28:55
  Speaker 3: Arlington.
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: They've actually done a contract, they've got an agreement that's not in writing.
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: Yes, meeting conferred, brownsville, beaumont, corpus Christi they've all got some type of bargaining.
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: So people don't understand.
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: About half of the cops in Texas do have bargaining.
• 29:11
  Speaker 3: The other half of the cops in this state are pretty much just at will employees.
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: So we've got, we've got it's all or nothing in Texas, but that's still light years ahead of Arkansas and Oklahoma and all the states that you know that abut Texas.
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: But compared to the Northeast we're still far behind.
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: Or compared to California.
• 29:31
  Speaker 4: And civil service protection has been helpful for those that don't have bargaining.
• 29:35
  Speaker 4: It's the outliers, too, that really, really struggle because civil service and you have to remember there's about five different types of civil service for Texas law enforcement.
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: Yes, it has been helpful for some of those that don't, but there's still only about 70 of those that have civil service that don't have bargaining of some kind and it's probably fewer than that.
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: Now there's probably more and more than adopted, meeting, conferred contracts of some kind, but but still we're talking about 200, 250 agencies out of 2,700.
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: That have any kind of due process or job protections at all.
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: And for the listener or watcher viewer, briefly top our touch on it, because some people may not even know what meeting confer even means.
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: Uh, East Texas meeting confer really doesn't even exist out there.
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: I think Lufkin might have an MOU, maybe, but I mean, but the rest do not.
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah, just you can't say MOU, it's a memorandum of understanding.
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: It's a type of meeting confer that may or may not fall into the statutes that permit meeting confer within the state of Texas.
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: Yes, if you guys want to briefly talk on just what.
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: What what a meet confer?
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: Very briefly, what, what does meet confer mean?
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: Well, it converts bargaining but it's it's completely voluntary, it's completely, you know, the city and and the officer's representative union, whatever.
• 30:52
  Speaker 3: They can sit down and bargain a contract but they're not compelled to.
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: It's permissive.
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: Bargaining requires the two sides to bargain in good faith.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: So I I can tell you since I'm the oldest person here uh, basically, uh, texas in the 1940s, right after World War II, the AFL and the CEO were separate.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: Afl were craftsmen, the CEO was industrial, the big old, the industrial plants, and they were, if not coming in, as they were leaning that way and driven by socialist wobblies, international stuff.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: And so that clash came in the forties and they were started organizing in Texas.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: Uh time we had electric streetcars in most major cities, so organized streetcar workers.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: So the state legislature in 1947 said they put all these anti-union deals right to work, no picketing, banning public workers from collective bargaining in the statute.
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: But thankfully probably Houston's a couple of big locals in the firefighters primarily got the state to adopt 12.
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: At the time was called 1269.
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: Today chapter 143, so that came about.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: Lots of cities got 140 civil service in that period it was.
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: I went and got the original.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: You know it's like five pages long, as today is like 200 pages long, but at the time it gave you some fundamental.
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: The base mission says to protect the police from political interference.
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: That's basically what 143 is.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: So all of that came about.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: In 1971, the firefighters pushed a collective bargaining bill.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: There was lots of uh militancy going on during the Vietnam war A lot of states were enacting bargaining laws and it was.
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: It was turbulent times but they couldn't get it passed.
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: The next session in 73, tmpa with the firefighters.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: The police were less interested in it but there were elements of the state that wanted it and they cut a deal.
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: But the governor, briscoe, would not sign it unless it had a local option requirements same as 143.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: Otherwise we'd have got it straight up.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: It'd be a different state today.
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: So that didn't happen.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: So we had a big rush of elections on my poor author, houston, the real grand, all the way up to sweetwater, oh yeah.
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: So there were hundreds and hundreds of elections in the seventies.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: I was involved in at least two in Mesquite.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: So everybody pretty much had won by about 75.
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: There was just a one win in here.
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: Dallas had two different.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: They weren't winning outside of the area.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: So it had kind of run its course.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: But everybody was afraid to mend the bargaining law because we're afraid the cities would get in there and gut it.
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: So it really started with Houston and a few other locals wanting to get something but didn't want to have an election.
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: So in a series of deals we got meeting confer passed to the legislature, cut a deal with Rick Perry, so you got like Buster Brown.
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: We got a rough public and they said look, it's not bargaining, it's meeting confer.
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: He's kind of condensing that a little bit.
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: The first meeting confer bill applied and it's in chapter 143.
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: Yes, right behind the civil service stuff.
• 34:36
  Speaker 3: It applies only to Houston, austin and Fort Worth Period, nobody else.
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: And Houston was able to do it without the referendum.
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: Austin was able to do it without the referendum because there's a provision in there said you can do it a certain way.
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: It's a city recognition and if you did it fast enough, but then Fort Worth waited too long and then Fort Worth eventually did it via the referendum process, there was a little backstory to that there's no doubt.
• 35:01
  Speaker 3: There's always a back.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: Fort Worth would have come under it on a census rollover and at the time the city opposed it and demanded they have a referendum and Mike Moncrieve wouldn't move the population bracket up so I could get ahead of it.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: So Fort Worth had to have a referendum and they won.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: They did and that's correct.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: But in Houston, austin and Fort Worth the firefighters and it'll take too long to explain why they all went for collective bargaining even though they had meet and confer.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: So those cities that police have meet and confer the fire have 174 collective bargaining.
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: I will tell you there is no subsidy, subsidy difference between any of them.
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: They're all meet and confer because in true collective bargaining there would be an impasse procedure.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: And so in 174, it's voluntary arbitration, which cities have never agreed to go to, or district court, and that was held in constitutional, recently been ruled to be constitutional.
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: But the reason no one will do that is that that language was written by Dr Morris at SMU who used the NLRB, national Relations Act.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: It says you have to have a trial based on private, comparable, so not public, and that's why no one's ever gone.
• 36:27
  Speaker 3: So in essence, you can have them Also the impasse provision in 174 was declared unconstitutional back in 93.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: Well, the judicial part was held unconstitutional because arbitration is voluntary Right.
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: The judicial review, yes, yeah, but that's been overturned now and it was overturned in a court author case in one court.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: But the recent firefighters in Houston, one that that was now constitutional firemen can probably go.
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: That's the case where both the firefighters and the city claimed victory when that decision came out.
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: They both said we won't.
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: Well, now they've got arbitration bill.
• 37:06
  Speaker 3: That's a good point.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: There's a bill passed just for them.
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: But the reason is the fire could use 174 judicial review because their job can be broken into private comparables.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: You know, pipe bidders, industrial firefighters, federal.
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: So right, especially in Southeast Texas we have all the chemical plants.
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: That's right Private fire departments, it's easy to get private sector comps?
• 37:31
  Speaker 3: There are none in the police, except that we do have some private police departments in Texas, like Rice University and SMU, and you know that's another can and I'm against.
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: I'm totally opposed to any university private having a police force.
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: I believe it's unconstitutional because nobody should be a police officer, a public officer in this state that does not answer to an appointed or elected official to the voters.
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: Somehow to the vote, because you're enforcing the Constitution in these private universities or private hospitals they can contract that work with if they want public officers or they can have private security.
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: I'm not against the security.
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: That horse is out of the barn.
• 38:14
  Speaker 3: No, no, no I can't stop it.
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: I can't stop it.
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: But you can see now this problem of when you work for a private university.
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: I won't name the university, but an officer who had been in a city police took on a university job because your kids can go to school for free.
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: You work for the university.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: He criticized the university it was very mild in a publication.
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: This said it's really not policing here.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: You basically call the dean or call their parents.
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: It's not like they fired him, ended up getting a private sector labor lawyer, went to court and the court said they fall in between.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: They don't have the constitutional.
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: You don't have First Amendment free speech unless you're a public worker over matters of mutual concern.
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: If he got fired he would have clearly been illegal in any public law enforcement agency and he lost his job and they're in that space and I think that's wrong.
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: I'll give you one of our name names.
• 39:16
  Speaker 3: Rice University had an officer named David Sedmak on a weekend left the campus to back up some Houston officers involved in a firefight and he was fired for leaving the campus to go help his brother officers who were being fired upon.
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: We did a press conference on it.
• 39:32
  Speaker 3: We screened bloody murder.
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: Senator John Whitmire then demanded copies of the reports and everything and Rice University told him we're not subject to open records or open meetings.
• 39:42
  Speaker 3: You can go pound sand.
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: That's correct.
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: Now Senator Whitmire passed some legislation that changed that.
• 39:49
  Speaker 4: I was going to say I wouldn't recommend saying that to Senator Whitmire.
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: It's been changed a little bit, but still the whole concept of private entities having police powers with no voter oversight is wrong and it should be unconstitutional.
• 40:05
  Speaker 4: It's questionable at least it should be in the courthouse by a real lawyer.
• 40:09
  Speaker 4: It's a delicate situation for our members.
• 40:13
  Speaker 4: I went to visit a large university.
• 40:15
  Speaker 4: In the parking lot A bunch of them are getting on duty.
• 40:18
  Speaker 4: There's police cars, they're in police uniform.
• 40:20
  Speaker 4: I go inside, ask to meet with the chief, just say hello and introduce myself.
• 40:23
  Speaker 4: He comes out and as we're walking down the hall he stops and he turns around and he goes just to let you know we're not really a police department.
• 40:29
  Speaker 4: I said well, that's weird, sir.
• 40:32
  Speaker 4: I said I was in the parking lot all the time.
• 40:34
  Speaker 4: There's these cars with these things on top Say police on the back and they have cages, and I saw a bunch of guys that dressed like you, that it looked like they're guns and badges.
• 40:42
  Speaker 4: They look like police in the parking lot.
• 40:45
  Speaker 4: Well, well, we are police but we're not.
• 40:47
  Speaker 4: And I said we have a presidential library here.
• 40:49
  Speaker 4: You have a lot of occasions for a bunch of things to occur here.
• 40:53
  Speaker 4: Probably some nuts would love to come bomb a.
• 40:56
  Speaker 4: You know some of these places that you have here, so you don't want to be the police.
• 41:00
  Speaker 4: Because he said we don't want to do anything, we don't want to have rifles, we don't want to do anything.
• 41:04
  Speaker 4: And I thought, man, it's shocking for a guy who has a ton of guys and gals under his command that his mindset he made clearly to me is we're not the police.
• 41:13
  Speaker 3: He also had a line of duty death not too long ago that was not eligible for, you know, inclusion on either one of the walls or for the public safety officer benefits because they are not public officers.
• 41:24
  Speaker 3: That's right.
• 41:24
  Speaker 4: What an amazing segue by our executive director Line of duty deaths.
• 41:32
  Speaker 4: Y'all, have y'all have a ton of union and labor experience.
• 41:37
  Speaker 4: The second thing you both have a ton of experience and knowledge on that I want listeners to hear about is our memorial and you both have a a ton of history, kind of in different ways.
• 41:51
  Speaker 4: But I know Kevin can spew dates and history and the genesis of our memorial and Ron for you guys that don't know when you, when you see, you know, a Texas Ranger from 1883 gets put on the wall this year, I've heard people say, well, how did that happen?
• 42:10
  Speaker 4: Or what's going on with that, or what's this line of duty from 1902?
• 42:14
  Speaker 4: Ron either discovered or was provided a lead and I guess for a while or now singularly do the background on that.
• 42:27
  Speaker 4: But I'd like to kick off because I think it's important, especially with us right now having to figure out what to do and raise funds to expand our wall, and I hate that we're having to expand it.
• 42:36
  Speaker 4: But I'd like to do maybe two quick segments, kevin, about where the memorial started and the genesis of how kind of what kicked that off.
• 42:45
  Speaker 4: And I love that ours is at the Capitol.
• 42:47
  Speaker 4: I'm super proud ours isn't stuck somewhere in a city or somewhere.
• 42:52
  Speaker 4: I'm proud that it's on our state Capitol.
• 42:54
  Speaker 3: You know Ron doesn't like to brag on himself, so I will run runs a Godfather of the Texas peace officers memorial.
• 43:02
  Speaker 3: It was his vision.
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: He was the one that got the whole thing started.
• 43:05
  Speaker 3: He was the one that got Buster Brown to introduce the legislation to create the thing.
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: When was that 89?
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, about 89.
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: No, it wasn't that, but when it ultimately passed.
• 43:15
  Speaker 3: It was, I think, 89.
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: 85 is kind of when it all got started.
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they dedicated it.
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: What in 99.
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: So it was about 10 years earlier.
• 43:23
  Speaker 3: 10 years to get it completely done, from the time it was finally approved until it was completed and dedicated 87 session introduced a study 89, put it into motion and there's a long story.
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: But it took 10 years and how it got prohibition against any public funds being used and then a few years later Ron went back to the legislature and got them to at least do matching funds on what we had all raised.
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: And there was a lot of different entities that held out in that process.
• 43:51
  Speaker 3: I was on that committee.
• 43:54
  Speaker 3: I played a very minor role at the time but I was, you know, there representing TMPA and but there were a lot of groups that helped out a lot of work that went into that.
• 44:03
  Speaker 3: It was almost identical to the timeline for the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.
• 44:09
  Speaker 3: It was going on during the same process.
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: Oh wow, I didn't know that.
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: I think it was actually dedicated a couple of years earlier in the state memorial, but there were, there were right there in neck and neck going on.
• 44:20
  Speaker 3: So, yeah, we give, we give Ron credit as being the godfather for the whole.
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: Well, just being a history buff and realizing that nobody really knew how many officers had been killed, which actually still don't know the number we're one of the few states that constantly finding cases.
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: Our history is pretty rough and violent, and so and we, always lead the nation and the number of officers I mean all the far away, almost from the beginning of the time.
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: Texas has more officers killed than any other state and always has, regardless of New York or California having at one time double the number officers, but we have more deaths.
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: Actually, california was starting the peace officers memorial and I was there on some function and went over the capital and they had like the old book in books, those large books, and they would write the name in and they would it's unclear if it would write the name of an officer killed and at the end of the year they would roll the page over and they were trying to build a memorial.
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: I said, well, that's what we need, and we got the bill, got some senators to file it in, houseman Bill Blackwood it was a big help and all that.
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: And so the problem lies.
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: We got it passed when they but I was insistent that it be on the capital grounds but there's a state preservation board run by the Speaker, the governor and Lieutenant Governor that controls.
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: That's like sacred ground and hundreds of groups are always wanting something on there and they're resistant to it.
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: So at the time Ken was on the committee or groups on the committee and survivors had this memorial committee, they said, well, we can put it over here by the insurance building.
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: I hated it.
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: At the moment I thought well, it would be right up front.
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: What a blessing.
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: What a blessing Turned out to be the most peaceful, perfect spot at the time.
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: Of course, the state architect Tico had a architect, a lady that designed it.
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: So then became the problem.
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: Originally, that's obelisk had a blue light shooting into the sky.
• 46:41
  Speaker 3: There was a laser show, that's right.
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: And the bottom was all water, and then a little stream was supposed to come out.
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: Yes, come out from that little spot.
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and so because the money at the time was like 1.6 million, it doesn't sound like a lot today.
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: At the time, in 19,.
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: It was a lot of money.
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: Anybody else had to give to it and so kind of went to the architect.
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: The committee didn't say what are actually.
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: We'll take out the light because the airport's going to stop that in the state preservation board, Don't just bypass that.
• 47:14
  Speaker 3: So the laser show was that was going to be so cool because it was going to be.
• 47:18
  Speaker 3: It was going to be a blue light that came in the stream yes.
• 47:21
  Speaker 3: During normal times, yeah.
• 47:23
  Speaker 3: And then, when we had a line of duty death, it was going to change to a red laser coming up between the obelisks, going into the sky.
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: You can see it from anywhere.
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: Wow, yeah, and that got cut out.
• 47:33
  Speaker 3: There was also a preservation board, also at a concern about the water leaking into the garage beneath it, and they said in the past they had had water things.
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: But you know, 50 years later the mechanics doesn't work, it leaks, you know, it becomes polluted.
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: I said, okay, how about take out the light?
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: Thank God we didn't do that, especially with Austin going on, but we had been shooting a bomb taking a bath down there right now.
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: Oh no, it'd be horrible.
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: Hell, no, it'll snail darker.
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: We shut it down.
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: So anyway, so anyway.
• 48:06
  Speaker 3: by the way, I also want to say this by far hands down the most impressive monument on Capitol grounds, and having it at the Capitol is the right thing to do.
• 48:15
  Speaker 3: I visited other states.
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: The New York City Police Memorial, by the way, is just to me.
• 48:20
  Speaker 3: It's depressing to look at it.
• 48:22
  Speaker 3: It's, you know, not well maintained and it's in a very the ingress and he goes.
• 48:27
  Speaker 3: It's horrible.
• 48:27
  Speaker 3: The Louisiana has a very nice memorial, but it's in a private cemetery.
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: Yes, georgia has it at their state law enforcement, fire and EMS training facility that the vast majority of the public can't get in the grounds Ours.
• 48:41
  Speaker 4: I agree with 1000%.
• 48:42
  Speaker 4: There was a day I was down here doing something several years ago and it was a long day, bad day, stressful day, and I don't know why.
• 48:49
  Speaker 4: I drove down to the Capitol I was just going to, I guess, walk around, I walked down and sat down there Most peaceful, perfect setting, shaded, burge, turpent.
• 48:59
  Speaker 4: I ended up sitting there a couple of hours and everything was good after.
• 49:03
  Speaker 3: If we could just paint that wall of the Sam Houston building.
• 49:06
  Speaker 3: It would help.
• 49:08
  Speaker 4: That wall is just kind of a we can't win, dude tonight what you got.
• 49:11
  Speaker 4: They also the police won't catch you because there's not enough of them, dps would pay an attention.
• 49:20
  Speaker 3: They're all down the border, yeah.
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: So anyway we got the.
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: We got it all got trimmed down.
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: The committee cut everything and then it got down to they gave us.
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: Basically you have a timeline when you start a project of about a decade and if you don't fund it it's gone, because there's probably 10 other Vietnam, various war memorials and just anything.
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: And the state said we're not putting any tax money in it because a minute I put tax money in it, everybody's going to us to fund their memorial.
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: So eventually in the commission was churning.
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: I had a couple of disagreements.
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: They were churning money trying to get fundraising and we only had about a half million in the bank but they needed to cut it all the way down to a million and I went over there and I keep.
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: Bill Ratliff might have been the house over finance and the guy from St Angel Robert I can't think of his last name with a J, he was a, he was a center Ratliff and him ran the.
• 50:21
  Speaker 3: Janice Bob Janice.
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: Yes, they were the two power houses, so I don't think it was.
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: It may have been told, or Fred told, or was a director who?
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: Where was the direct time?
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: Of course they're there cause a budget.
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: So I came and I sit and we sit and we sit every day in finance and finally just had a conversation Look, this more is going away.
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: I mean we're down to the end.
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: I need the funding.
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: And they came up with a deal that I don't mean for.
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: It's just DPS motor vehicle and section stickers.
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: John Sharp was a controller of the state and so he was a good friend of mine.
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: He went to him.
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: He said all right, just do this.
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: So they passed it and it said if what's budgeted for DPS tickets exceeds, they can match dollar for dollar up to 500,000, something roughly like that.
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: So I get a call one day in from Fred says I think he's watching, I think the DPS has written enough tickets that we can get the money.
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: I called John Sharp, he certified it and that's what said let's do it.
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: And that's how it got dedicated by Tico in 1999, rained all day.
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: I mean it was a mess, but there was only 586 names that have been identified.
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: Wow, 586 at the time that that agencies brought forward and I said that was 24 years ago.
• 51:49
  Speaker 3: Yes, we typically average 12 to 15 line of duty deaths a year, not counting COVID.
• 51:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but if you think about it, if you extrapolate that out, we shouldn't be anywhere near the 2200 names or 2300 names that are on there now.
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: That's because we've identified all of these other cases that you're talking about and we keep finding more, and more and we also added TTC.
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: It wasn't in the original bill.
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: We added correction officers for counties.
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: It just because state has another story.
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: When the state had to train all the sheriff's department used to everybody was a deputy in the sheriff's department.
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: Soon as they had to provide the training, they got a separate category for jailers, dropped the hours down to almost nothing at the time.
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: They weren't peace or they aren't peace officers, so we had to add them and you might remember that federal officers Remember the state female border patrol officer and another officer in, I think Mac Allen, answered the call of kid, who was a son of a police officer, was shooting out they.
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: He ended up killing this border patrol officer and her partner Harlan.
• 53:02
  Speaker 3: Harlan.
• 53:03
  Speaker 3: It was his daddy's duty weapon.
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: Yes, and so the father came to the legislature in testifying he wanted his daughter's name on the statement more, but we didn't have any category.
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: So all the groups that sure, why not?
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: So we did.
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: So that's how we added the feds.
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: So actually I brought all the feds up to snuff.
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: I got with the National Memorial officer down, some of the Board of Provence, the gaming stuff, so I was able to get we caught up on the federal historic.
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: We just had this last year, had another one that died back 30 years ago, and then I did.
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: I got TDC, which is really I mean, anyway, they're a strange organization I.
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: But I got the prison museum to help me.
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: Jim Willett, who was the director, used to be awarding.
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: He helped us and we.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: So we all got everybody caught up and that added like eight or 900 names.
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: So we never thought we'd have to go to the back.
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: Could have thought it just at the time.
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: You had 500 names with 2000 spaces on the front.
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: We're already moved to the back.
• 54:12
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 54:12
  Speaker 3: The thinking was we've already got, we caught.
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: We got almost 200 years of history.
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: We're going all the way back to the original Texas Rangers, commissioned by President Sam Houston.
• 54:22
  Speaker 3: We're thinking almost 200 years.
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: We've only got less than 600 names.
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: This will last forever.
• 54:28
  Speaker 3: Wow, and it's lasted us less than a quarter of a century.
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: That's correct and we've already been moving to the back of the wall.
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: Now for the last three years, three years, four years maybe, and we're having to move a bunch of names to the back of the wall.
• 54:43
  Speaker 4: And we're currently in works collaboration with all the vested parties to fundraise, because just moving to the back is not, is not going to be sufficient.
• 54:55
  Speaker 4: Is that right?
• 54:56
  Speaker 3: Well, not not forever.
• 54:57
  Speaker 3: We bought us some time by moving some of the older names, but eventually we will fill up the back of that wall and then we'll have to come up with another plan.
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: We'll have to extend the walls further down those sidewalks we're also adding a canine memorial.
• 55:11
  Speaker 3: That legislation was passed in 21.
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: We now have a private donor who's contributed the funds to to complete that process.
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: We got to identify him, though, right, oh yeah, Lawncraft.
• 55:22
  Speaker 3: Past president.
• 55:22
  Speaker 4: Shout out, shout out to Lawncraft.
• 55:24
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, so he's donated $25,000.
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: I don't think the project will take that much money, so he has agreed that whatever money we have left over we can put toward the wall and the moving of the names.
• 55:35
  Speaker 3: We also need to do some upgrades to the, to the landscaping of the lighting around the back of the wall so people that want to go see those names can walk back there.
• 55:44
  Speaker 4: Thank, you, Uncle Lawn.
• 55:46
  Speaker 3: My favorite.
• 55:46
  Speaker 4: You're always my favorite, uncle.
• 55:49
  Speaker 3: We just have to get with the, with the preservation board, and finalize you know what, exactly what that is going to look like and start getting them.
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: You know the architecture done on that as well.
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: So, but yeah, we're going to have eventually we're going to have to expand the wall and that's expensive, because if it was a million developed at the beginning, you know it's three, four or five million.
• 56:12
  Speaker 2: I've always wondered this why is that thing is built out of granite, is it not?
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: Or marble?
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: Is it marble, most of it?
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: I think the walls, they're slabs.
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: Okay, it's not a solid block.
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: They they're slabs there and they take the right, the facia, the facias, yeah, and they take it off and then put a new one on or move it Right.
• 56:31
  Speaker 3: But the frame of it is leaking from just erosion and water and we don't know where they were built from or what we corrected that, yeah, a couple of years ago, ten years ago now, we had to spend a ton of money, like $350,000, to correct that.
• 56:47
  Speaker 3: They call it leaching.
• 56:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, got that done, but but that's going to get need to get redone yet again.
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's, there's constantly, you know, maintenance and upkeep repairs that have to be done to each truck I don't know where they're going to put more walls and that you went to the front and did it like it's a circle, then you would almost not be able to have a service there, I think you might be able to put someone around the base of the of the like the national, but that's only going to haul so many.
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: And then my concern is people having to.
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: I know they do it.
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: They don't have to get down on their knees, no, I think I think we do like the Vietnam Memorial and just go down the sidewalk, just go do east, Sorry.
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: You could do it in slats.
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but that's going to cost millions and millions of dollars.
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: You're still.
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: You're probably a decade or more away.
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: Covid added yeah, and there's probably another.
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: I want to guess it looking at my Excel, about no three.
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: At least 300 people waiting because you're required to get ERS approval now.
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: I know.
• 57:52
  Speaker 3: A lot of those are not going to be approved.
• 57:54
  Speaker 3: No, they're not In my opinion.
• 57:55
  Speaker 3: A lot of them are not because of their line of duty desk.
• 57:57
  Speaker 3: But yes, we're still going to have a significant number of names already that need.
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: There's probably at least a hundred that were approved.
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: Just didn't get on this run, yes, and so that'll slow out, that'll filter out.
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: There's nobody doing a lot of historical research, but there'll always be a few, but not in big blocks of a hundred or so, yeah, so now I don't even know if you want to talk about this question of suicides.
• 58:26
  Speaker 4: Maybe we save that for another one.
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: All right, because that decision is coming in the federal office.
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: Say this the federal government, because of the January six deaths, has ruled that suicide on the federal level meets the federal death benefits act.
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: There's four or five states and in Canada where they have now ruled on selected cases that those were post traumatic death.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's been coming for several years.
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: Or moving in Australia and serve and I get it.
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: It's emotionally driven.
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: There's lots of factors but let's just assume that they come up with a criteria.
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: I know 50 people who committed suicide were police.
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: This may.
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: Maybe we wouldn't have enough wall, and how far back is that?
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: I'm just saying that's.
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: The next biggest challenge to the memorial community is how we deal with that.
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: The federal government kind of opened the door.
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: I know California has it.
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: They're right now they're not doing it, but the four or five states are getting ready to approve.
• 59:36
  Speaker 3: Am I correct, though, that, even though the Feds did in fact approve a standard and include blue suicide, only one was added this year, and that was the?
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: the first one there.
• 59:48
  Speaker 3: Washington Metro officer committed suicide nine days after that incident, but that's the only one that's been added so far.
• 59:55
  Speaker 3: I'll say this I don't agree with the federal standard.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 3: I think there needs to be more added to it.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 3: But I will also say after you, valdy, I've rethought my position on this, because I certainly can see where an officer could be so traumatized by having to witness that kind of carnage that his sacrifice should go on the wall and his family should receive those benefits and those honors.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: Well, national FOP now has come out in favor of suicides being added to the moron, and I agree with in principle.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: I don't think we ought to go down that road.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: But I can't see how we're not, because the question is always going to be somebody is going to fit a pattern of which reasonable minds would say there is no question that officer.
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: But we know it's real.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: I mean, how many soldiers kill themselves every day and police officers kill?
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: you know there's a Right, but how do you do it without creating an incentive, a financial incentive for an officer?
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 3: To take his own life, and that's what concerns me most about it, and I also worry about the families of officers who were killed.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: You know, trying to take down an armed suspect or whatever, seeing their hero's name surrounded by names of officers who chose to take their own lives and it just seems to diminish that honor.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: Well, you'll be involved.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: I won't be involved because there's I'm just saying, and I sent a note over to the Memorial Committee several times, just giving them articles saying this is coming.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: I believe there's at least two departments have submitted recent suicides to the Memorial as line of duty deaths.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: I won't name the agency, but so they've been sent.
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: Now they can reject them or not reject them.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: Just remember it is a statute, family could sue and I mean they might win the fact that be considered it we probably ought to get ahead of it, at least legislatively, and move it into a category where there be some study or time to vet it.
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: Because, just remember, if A gets on and B says, well, mine's similar to A, then B's gonna want on.
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 3: I don't know how to deal with it.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 3: You bring that up because TMPA is currently we actually partnered up with PORAC and COPLINE and we are helping sponsors some research into blue suicide and how you know what leads to blue suicide, but also whether or not prior traumatic brain injuries contribute to-.
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 4: CTE Much like-.
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 3: Repeated concussions, much like the research the NFL did for their players.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 3: There's a push, there's an effort going on right now to do some research into that for law enforcement officers.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: But maybe, rod, at some point we look at the qualifier for the benefits, but not the walls.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: I agree.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: I'm glad I don't have to decide because, strangely, as hard as my outside is, I'm soft inside about this, like all of us are, because we know the people involved and we know the trauma Only because of his age.
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 3: by the way, you get more emotionally soft, we get to 75.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: but I see it from all the sides and but I do think it's something we ought to start talking about in the memorial process and getting people involved because it will be here.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: I just don't want it to come emotionally driven by some state legislator and next thing you know we have a bill-.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: Shove down our throat 50,000 people are now Elzboll.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: Submit their names going back 100 years, or for the sole motivation behind it to be.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 3: Whatever your perception is of the January 6th event, that's correct.
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: That should not have anything to do with it.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: Anyway, enough, save it for another day, but it is coming.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 4: I would love to put a placeholder in it and have a part two of this.
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 4: You, you, both of you are a treasure for the Texas labor movement Y'all's history and knowledge of the history, your involvement in it.
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 4: I think this is super important and I'm not comparing you out of my grandfather, I promise, but my grandfather, my whole life told stories and nobody ever memorialized him and he's passed away and now everybody can't really remember exactly what they are.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 4: And I think this is important.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 4: In 60 minutes, the amount of history you guys share the hell.
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 4: I thought I knew a lot of it from hanging out with you that I've learned and I think it's super important.
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 4: I would love if you guys to do a part two.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 3: We haven't even started talking about all the fighting we've done with each other along the way.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 4: No, but that's the cool part about it too, though.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: He won't tell you.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: I represented him when he was in Georgetown.
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 4: But no, that is the cool part about it because you guys have been around the block good side, bad side, and sitting here today, both collectively sharing the what y'all contributed to history of labor movement and law enforcement in Texas.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 4: I would love to do a part, two or a part two and a part three and get some of this memorializer of people on to watch it.
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 4: They can sit down and hear some of this because, as my son, said I'm going to start visiting y'all every month because you're not getting any younger.
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: But I do think we didn't even get to the what's going on labor wise nationally, police reform, how it impacts the nation, how it impacts Texas and it does impact the road the prosecution of police, the weaponization of the district attorney's office.
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 2: Let's just do part two.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 2: Sounds like part four, five and six.
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 2: I freaking love it.
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 4: We normally do a rapid fire, but that's only when we end an episode.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 4: I know this is not goodbye, we'll see you soon.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and we're trying to keep these briefs so people will watch for an hour and not zone out and turn us off and go somewhere else.
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 4: After two hours, absolute freaking.
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 4: Enjoyed getting to listen to you guys go back and forth and share the history of labor, of law enforcement.
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 4: I hope everybody stays tuned for two, three, four, five and part six, yeah.
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 2: Ron's, good meeting you, man.
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 2: I've heard a lot about you.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 2: It's always all good.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's okay, I'm an acquired taste.
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 2: You like fine wine Everybody likes it Boss.
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 2: I appreciate you taking time out of your busy ass schedule to come in and hang out with us.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 2: You bet let's go take your work.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right, ron, I'll see you soon All right, you guys stay, stay safe out there.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 2: Hit that subscribe button.
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 2: We greatly appreciate you guys tuning in and you viewers, watchers.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 2: Again, you guys stay safe.
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 2: God bless you, all of you, and, as always, may God bless Texas.