By Joe Hyde
Publisher
April 12, 2008

On the night of August 19, 2007, San Angelo Police Chief Tim Vasquez says he was confronted by a Hispanic female when walking out of the men’s room at The Oasis nightclub. She expressed to him that she didn’t appreciate Vasquez running against her buddy, San Angelo Police Department narcotics officer Jeff Davis, for police chief. Words were exchanged, and according to Vasquez, the girl tapped him on the chest. The girl, however, paid the SAPD a visit the following Monday and demanded that she be able to make a statement that the chief of police had pinched her on the buttocks. The charge amounted to sexual assault.

With juicy exposition like that, many people are intrigued with the current race for police chief. But what is really going on at the San Angelo Police Department? Why are five candidates vying for Tim Vasquez’s job? And is the current chief really someone who would pinch a woman’s buttocks?

Except for the tantalizing details, why should we care?

We should care because the incident evolved into a gigantic political flap over the immediate reactions of the chief and his inner circle that almost cost Vasquez his job, or worse, ended in his felony or misdemeanor indictment. The State’s prestigious Texas Rangers were called in to investigate, and a district attorney took the case to a grand jury. The main result was for the citizens of San Angelo to be presented with a roughly 700-page report released by the Texas Rangers and published over the Internet for the whole world to read, an unprecedented step by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

More than this, however, is that “The Report,” as voluminously painful as it is to read, has provided insight into how Vasquez approaches a personal crisis; a peek into his character at his most vulnerable. It reveals that San Angelo’s top cop is imperfect, as most human beings are. It also provides fodder for Vasquez’s opponents to direct wild accusations against him, while pointing to The Report—which few voters have time to dissect—as proof.

Finally, The Report provides insight into the potential problems a police chief election can create: An organization of uniformed officers is thrown into disunity and becomes seemingly dysfunctional as its members divide loyalties amongst a number of candidates every four years.

Here is the condensed version, in case you haven’t read The Report:

After the nightclub incident, Vasquez learned the next Monday that the woman filing the complaint was also known to Vasquez as a “confidential informant,” or CI, for the SAPD narcotics division. The CI was under management of Jeff Davis, Vasquez’s election opponent. Vasquez spent about a week trying to figure out how to approach the problem. Should he reveal that the CI works for his opponent, insinuating the incident was politically motivated? Under deadline pressure, San Angelo Standard-Times reporter Paul Anthony demands an answer, and the article quotes Vasquez as saying, yes, she was an informant for the narcotics division, and that she answered to Vasquez’s nemesis, Jeff Davis.

The special prosecutor’s investigation of the Valarie Plame affair two years ago on the federal level didn’t result in the indictment or conviction of anyone accused of revealing the identity of the so-called CIA operative. But the political fallout was fierce, just like it has been locally with the Vasquez investigation. Almost everyone smells blood.

In the end, a grand jury declined to indict Vasquez. In legal terms, the whole case was “no billed.”

“I knew it was political and I felt it was important for the public to know the truth about the incident. I’ve always been up front with the public,” Vasquez says. In retrospect, after enduring the investigation and grand jury appearance, and having time for reflection, Vasquez admits he could have handled the saga differently. “I guess I should have had more faith in the voters, that they could see through this whole thing, and see that it was all politically motivated,” he says.

Internal Turbulence and Police “Unions”

It is a litigious society today, and now more than ever, police officers are under intense scrutiny for their actions on the beat. Whenever an injury or a death occurs in the line of duty, or even off duty, there is no shortage of lawyers ready to sue. And, because of civil service laws, internal affairs investigations of officer actions, and ensuing legal discipline, there is no shortage of arbitration sessions where police personnel with legal representation have fared better.

Legal defense insurance is the primary benefit of membership in one of two Texas police unions. In San Angelo, the dominant union (and recognized collective bargaining agent) is the Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas, or CLEAT. The other is the Texas Municipal Police Association, or TMPA. For about $30 per month, officers can voluntarily join one or the other union, and receive legal defense at no additional charge, in addition to assistance negotiating better pay and benefits. The two organizations are at loggerheads statewide and compete financially for membership, and some of that divisiveness has spilled over into the SAPD force. Vasquez, who is now with TMPA, was formerly the president of the local CLEAT chapter and the local chapter’s “Officer of the Year” in 2004.

Charlie Wilkinson, political director for CLEAT in Austin, says the competition between his organization and TMPA had been settled in San Angelo, at least, when the CLEAT local chapter was chosen to be the primary bargaining organization for the SAPD.

But Vasquez remains miffed with CLEAT, and vice-versa.

According to Vasquez, the rift between him and CLEAT began shortly after he first took office and lobbied in Austin to have the Texas Legislature change civil service laws to allow him the ability to add additional “assistant police chief” billets. “That upset the home office of CLEAT and CLEAT adamantly opposed me,” Vasquez says. CLEAT’s opposition included sending current opponent in this election, Steve Mida, to Austin to oppose Vasquez. “They wanted to ‘meet and confer’ instead,” he says.

“Meet and confer” is a negotiation scheme devised under Texas civil service law to allow city hall and the police department to work out differences on the local level, without disturbing the statewide legislative process. But whatever agreement made must be ratified by both a city council and police force vote. Meet and confer is how police unions can bargain for better pay and benefits.

Appointing assistant chiefs, and how many of them a chief can appoint, is a political hot potato because opponents of Vasquez’s administration say it gives him too much latitude to engage in cronyism. And although meet and confer was only enacted into state law the same year, 2005, Vasquez’s attempt to modify civil service laws in Austin circumvented the local process, even though there wasn’t much of one at the time.

CLEAT’s Wilkinson says Vasquez crossed “the demilitarized zone” with his lobbying. From CLEAT’s statewide perspective, changing state law to satisfy a local issue could have broken agreements his organization had standing with other local municipalities across the state for decades. “He [Vasquez] didn’t understand it. He didn’t see globally, because it was a state law [he was trying to change], and it would have affected every municipality. There was a purpose for limiting it [the number of assistant chief positions],” Wilkinson says. Vasquez says at the time, there was no other mechanism available to authorize his third assistant chief position.

Wilkinson counters that there was collective bargaining, but either method was akin to using a hammer where a screwdriver would have sufficed. Meet and confer, enacted here in 2007, now serves as the screwdriver to solve many civil service issues.

Vasquez lost the battle, but the incident shines more light on principle disagreements in visions on how to organize the police force here.

Top-Down or Lateral Organization

“He went about it in a wrong way,” says Jeff Davis of the assistant chiefs billet controversy. “He went there [to Austin] saying he had the blessing of the mayor and city council when he didn’t. Our officers [Steve Mida, also a candidate for chief in this election] from CLEAT went down there [to Austin] and told them, look, we don’t need three assistant chiefs.”

The captain positions were traded away with the city council for higher pay for the entire force. According to Vasquez, because civil service laws allow for promotion through the ranks based upon longevity and testing, there was no real power for the chief to choose his inner circle. More importantly for the taxpayer, however, the longevity system could promote an officer not having the necessary leadership traits to captain, above their abilities or credibility, creating a higher-paid yet ineffective member of the force.

Davis disagrees. He says the absence of the captains has created a void in the organizational structure. He thinks the force needs at least one captain, of not two. And he wants to explore getting rid of the second assistant chief position and replace it with an administrative sergeant. This structure is similar to how the force was organized when Davis joined it in 1985. But back then, Davis says, there were four captains and a major serving as the sole assistant chief.

The missing captains flatten the pyramid, which is exactly what Vasquez says is needed today: A lateral organization. Vasquez’s vision is to have three assistant chiefs chosen by the chief to manage three divisions of the department: field Services, investigative services and support services. With only two assistants, however, Vasquez has been forced to have one chief oversee two divisional responsibilities.

“It’s a better way to manage Generation X and Y,” Vasquez says. The younger recruits need more latitude and attention to not only accept orders, but to understand them. And a lateral organization provides rank-and-file patrol officers more contact with the top, says Vasquez. Davis says it creates micromanagement.

Civil Service Woes

Uniformed services of the U.S. Military aren’t afforded the same protections that civil service employees that service their airplanes are given. Civil service status is intended to protect employees from political whims. It’s a great benefit for employees, but it can be a hindrance to an active chain-of-command. It is severely difficult for leadership to fire, promote, or demote without civil service commission involvement. And documentation.

In a civil service environment, how does a leader motivate subordinates to achieve excellence? That is the problem Vasquez wanted to solve when he enacted the “minimum work standard,” a controversial policy that requires officers to perform to 70 percent of the “average” standard.

Vasquez’s police force measures performance on a point system. Write a parking ticket? Get half a point. Write a speeding ticket? That’s one point. Catch a thief? Two points. At the end of the shift, officers are expected to have earned 10 points to meet the standard.

According to Vasquez, it has become an objective tool to rack and stack his officers, and rank their performance from unsatisfactory to excellent in the civil service environment. And it has motivated slackers to rise up to the 70 percent level, which is better for the taxpayers.

Opponents, like Davis, say the system has been detrimental to morale. He maintains those that used to be the top officers who formerly performed above the MWS now can get away with the lower performance, and have migrated there. “It’s human nature,” he says. Meanwhile, according to Davis, there were less than a dozen or so slackers to begin with, and maybe that problem has been solved, but was it worth the cost of lowering overall expectations of the top officers?

Besides that, Davis maintains, is the pressure to get easy traffic tickets, and that is concentrating patrols where traffic violations are more likely to occur, robbing the neighborhoods of much needed patrol time. “You’re not going to go out there [and have the opportunity to] arrest 10 people per day, but the tickets are easy,” Davis says.

 Vasquez disagrees. “I want that officer contact with the public,” he says. And by “contact” Vasquez maintains that his officers have the discretion under MWS to write a ticket, write a warning, or issue a verbal warning and still earn the same amount of points. The points are awarded from the record of a radio call, not the ticket slips. Proof? “Our traffic tickets have increased only 4 percent since MWS was implemented,” he says.

If Davis wins and does away with the MWS, how will he measure officer performance? “You place that burden on their immediate supervisors that are the field sergeants. They should be doing their job. They did it years ago, they did it before this [MWS], and you put that burden on them,” he says.

Davis’s position relies upon old-fashioned leadership and mentorship, and subjectivity. Vasquez has implemented an objective measurement system that requires more record keeping and paperwork, but argues that the civil service system requires more documentation to apply effective management. That is, documentation that can be used as a tool to promote, demote, and fire.

But it’s the paperwork that is killing the field sergeants, Davis maintains.

San Angelo Police: Meet the HAL 9000

Vasquez is young, one of the first chiefs who spent his entire career with computerization. He is comfortable with information technology. (After all, the investigating Texas Ranger retrieved evidence from an Exchange e-mail server and data from the chief’s Palm Treo handheld to write The Report). But more recently, computers and networks have been joined by workable and standardized user interfaces that are easier to use. When coupled with a distributed network, like a Microsoft network, creating, storing, and retrieving database information doesn’t require a computer genius to accomplish.

That has afforded Vasquez revolutionary technology opportunities to exploit. And he has proceeded further into this area than any previous chief could. Vasquez did so by more fully implementing the department’s Intergraph software platform. Intergraph is commercial database software designed for public safety organizations and used to store reports and citations. And track minimum work standards.

Everything a patrol officer does on a shift is recorded in the database. Vasquez says the data can help the department identify training deficiencies and trends. The information is so well organized, and searchable, that the department can pull data on just about anything, down to the individual actions of one patrolman.

“When we had the Taser incident [an officer’s Taser ignited a suspect who had doused himself with gasoline], the paper asked me for data on how many times a Taser was used in the line of duty. Well, since we were tracking that information since April [2007], I was able to definitely say how many times since April [a Taser was used]. I couldn’t say before that, because we didn’t have the systems to track it easily,” Vasquez says.

Davis believes the cost to manpower maintaining all the records in Intergraph is overloading the field sergeants and forcing them to sit in front of a computer most of each day instead of being out on the beat with their patrol officers.

Vasquez agrees with the importance of community policing, and says he advocates it. He just wants to more effectively measure it.

To Appoint or Elect a Chief

The SAPD is one of only five Texas police departments—along with those in Brownwood, Coleman, Groves, and Stamford—that elects a chief of police. The remainders appoint a chief, usually with city council advice and consent.

Proponents of the elected chief claim it’s the nirvana of democracy to do so. Opponents say it’s disruptive to the morale and welfare of a healthy police force and causes a lack of continuity in the force where it’s badly needed, especially in the modern age. Vasquez agrees. “It takes one year to get your feet wet, then you have two years to lead before your last year, where you have to start campaigning all over again,” he says.

There is also the issue of qualifications to be chief. The centerpiece of candidate Ed Cunningham’s campaign is that he is the only candidate that would qualify to apply for the position of police chief, in accordance with Texas law, if San Angelo chose to go with the appointed process. On the other hand, there are no statewide qualifications for an elected chief.

Wilkinson says electing a chief is a throwback to a different time when the police chief required more of a personal connection with a community. But law enforcement in the 21st century is more professional than in, say, the 1930s. There are professional college degrees in law enforcement; training; certifications; and a multitude of professional law enforcement entities that can incubate police force leaders that didn’t exist 80 years ago. “San Angelo is the only city of its size that still elects a police chief,” he says. “I guess there is a fear of some kind with the voters that they will be giving back power if they abandon it.”

Uniformed services can appreciate a depth of experience as well as a breadth of experience in their leadership. Experience depth is technical proficiency of the tools used in one’s job, usually within the confines of one organization over years and years. But a breadth of experience is gained by sacrificing some of that experience depth to participate in a multitude of organizations. For example, a police officer may have experience working in a large law enforcement organization in Dallas or Houston, the state Department of Public Safety, or other organizations before applying to be a chief of police. The benefit to the public is the resulting leaders bring problem-solving experience and benchmarking opportunities from a variety of locations and situations, as well as professional contacts, that benefit local police departments professionally.

Yet outsiders, those without significant depth of experience at the SAPD, have to climb a steep incline to get elected in San Angelo’s supercharged political environment. And this can deny San Angelo citizens a field of candidates from across the nation that other Texas cities enjoy.

Then there is the internal turmoil every four years where brothers and sisters-in-arms are required to split loyalties amongst a usually large field of candidates. This year isn’t the exception. In 2004, then-police chief Joe Gibson was pummeled in an election following public frustrations with the SAPD and its investigations of the deaths of Michael Clay Jr., a black man, and David Moses Chappa. The racial issues of 2004 were much more weighty than this year’s controversy over The Report. The field of candidates last time was as large as this year’s election, and it ended in a very competitive runoff between Mida and Vasquez.

This year, brothers-in-arms are splitting into multiple political camps again. These are police officers who are supposed to rely upon one another in life-or-death situations. In this fractious atmosphere, will a Mida supporter trust a Vasquez supporter as vehemently in a firefight? Is it healthy to divide uniformed officers along fierce political lines every four years?

“It can be [unhealthy],” Davis says, “and actually I was for the appointed position initially but the city didn’t come up with the structure, guidelines, and criteria about how they were going to set it [the selection process] up. Either it was [going to be with the] public safety commission or not. And so I bailed out of it. I said, ‘You know what? I am tired of being a mushroom. Don’t keep me in the dark. Just let me know [how the city leaders will implement the process fairly], and then I can vote.”

The voters don’t trust their leaders on city council to implement a fair selection process. And so, last November, the voters did not approve a city charter change to appoint the next police chief and the SAPD once again is in internal turmoil over an election for its chief. A change to the city charter on this issue cannot be reintroduced until 2009.

The Ultimate Result of “The Report”

The Report may one day be used as a training exhibit on how city government should not implement a police department. Besides Vasquez, it implicates an entire department torn apart by political infighting that is affecting the ability of rank-and-file officers to succeed at their jobs.

Shortly after the altercation at The Oasis, the complainant called Davis. Davis says on the weekend of the incident, he was dealing with flooding at his home and did not have the opportunity to talk to her until Monday, at which time she explained what happened. Davis says he contacted his supervisor after the conversation. He adds that he did not coach the victim, or even advise her to file a report. “I said, ‘I can’t tell you to do it, and I can’t tell you not to do it,’” Davis says.

In the ensuing days, as Vasquez, his staff, and attorneys wrangled over how to write a report and how to handle the fact that the complainant was an undercover informant, the SAPD became a leaking sieve of rumors pouring out and into the public. Police officers used handheld voice recorders to record their conversations between one another to cover their own culpability. No one appeared to trust his fellow comrades-in-arms. It was as if everyone in charge was playing a giant game of “Gotcha!”

CLEAT attorney Mike Richman, seemingly willing to add to the pressure on Vasquez—who the organization considers the maverick who offended union bosses by crossing the line three years ago—was fueling the fire with Freedom of Information Requests for copies of the investigation. Although at the state level, Wilkinson says that CLEAT views police chiefs “just like any other officer,” the actions of CLEAT’s attorney appear biased against Vasquez and disruptive to the chain-of-command and the ongoing investigation.

In the end, the charge leveled against Vasquez, which almost earned him a felony indictment, was that he publicly released information to newspaper reporter Paul Anthony revealing that the complainant was a confidential informant, but not her name.

Sworn statements in the report from several people indicate that Anthony already knew as much about the Vasquez/CI incident—and as much about the identity of the complainant—as those at the top of city government. All Vasquez had to do was officially say it, and Anthony had an attributable quote. Otherwise, the paper’s editorial staff would be wrangling with the ethics of choosing the phrase like “sources inside say” or “sources wishing not to be identified say” to attribute the information to an anonymous leaker (like they did in Washington with the Valarie Plame incident). Vasquez says he was misquoted; Paul Anthony provided a sworn affidavit that the quote was true and correct.

Did Anyone Really Care if the CI was Revealed?

In the end, because of CLEAT’s Freedom of Information request, backed up by the local paper’s, all the dirty laundry is viewable (and searchable) by everyone, including the members of drug gangs, to identify the confidential informant. One can learn that the CI is a Hispanic female, with “wild hair,” wears an “earring [sic] in her upper lip and nose,” and is married to a man who enjoys membership in a so-called drug gang called “The Banditos.” If you downloaded the report when it first appeared online at Conchoinfo.org, you also learned Tim Vasquez’s Social Security Number (but no one else’s).

The very system of laws designed to protect the identity of the CI turned against her.

According to Davis, the SAPD narcotics division today is having a hard time cultivating confidential informants. And the taxpayer may be wondering how all of this infighting is benefiting the public safety of the citizens.

Conclusion

No one will ever know conclusively if Vasquez committed the deed on the CI’s buttocks. However, any man in power should be wary of a similar incident being brought to light on his tenure. You can’t prove a ‘he said, she said’ argument, but allegations of sexual assault have a very loud echo in the court of public opinion.

Vasquez has a polygraph test from the independent firm Behavioral Measures & Forensic Services SW, Inc. indicating that he is telling the truth—that he did not pinch the woman on the buttocks. But opponents like Davis are quick to point out that Vasquez refused to take the official DPS test. The complainant didn’t submit to any test (she claims this is because Vasquez wouldn’t take the official one).

In The Report, you’ll find an interesting tidbit by SAPD Sergeant Fred Dietz as he describes a suggestion made by assistant chief Kevin Hollway during the height of the crisis:

“I remember Assistant Chief Hollway making a comment like maybe that's why the Chief should quit hanging out in bars and go to church like he tells people he does.”

Had Vasquez indeed gone to church, he may have heard a sermon on the ruthlessness of King Solomon (starting at 1 Kings 2:13). Solomon, King David’s younger son, was awarded the throne by his father, and consolidated his power quickly by killing his older brothers who could have challenged him after his father’s death. Oftentimes, effective leadership requires ruthlessness.

The question is, could even King Solomon calm the political turmoil in the San Angelo Police Department, fomented by an archaic election process for its leadership?

To learn more about each candidate for San Angelo Police Chief, see this link.