“Defund the police” has come for at least one local law enforcement agency in one of the reddest states in the nation. This police department could have avoided this ignominious fate simply by not being generally awful. But the person leading the now-defunct department couldn’t seem to do his job without violating rights on the regular. And that’s how this ended up going down in Texas once state law enforcement officials got involved:
A police department in Texas that arrested a local resident for complaining on social media about their city’s contaminated water supply has been ordered closed after failing to prove it provided any benefit to the community.
State officials stepped in to investigate after Jennifer Combs spent a night in jail in May after a post appeared on her Facebook page suggesting people were hospitalized by bacteria in the water pipes of Trinidad, a municipality in Henderson county about 75 miles south-east of Dallas.
The (now-former) police department referenced in this report once failed to serve the residents of Trinidad, Texas. The biggest problem appears to have been (now-former) police chief Charles Gregory, who did nothing but double-down on his First Amendment violations before stepping away from the job shortly before the state’s commission on law enforcement decided the Trinidad PD served no public purpose.
Gregory not only tried to get Combs indicted for bringing attention to town water quality issues, but arrested a supporter of Combs for daring to “display” a “FUCK BAD COPS” sign outside of city hall during one of its meetings.
After an investigation, the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCLE) sent a letter to the town’s mayor, letting him know the state had decided to pull the plug on the PD.
Chief Gregory may have been the biggest problem, but he wasn’t the PD’s only problem:
According to the news channel, the police department lacked resources for officers, including not having bulletproof vests or an evidence room.
Other highlighted failings were problems with use-of-force policies, active shooter situations, vehicle pursuits and the professional conduct of officers.
While some might suggest this lack of public value wasn’t completely the PD’s fault (see also: lack of Kevlar vests, a functioning evidence room), the possibly underfunded PD apparently did the least it could with its limited resources.
As for Chief Gregory, he took the easy way out when it became apparent he had no business running a law enforcement agency (into the ground). When a grand jury refused to indict citizen journalist Jennifer Combs on trumped-up “threatening public safety” charges, Gregory resigned, rather than face more criticism from critics he’d failed to put in jail, as well as to avoid answering questions posed by the judge who handled the Combs arrest warrant and now claimed to have been “misled” by Chief Gregory.
Even if you ignore everything seen here, it’s tough to see how the town of Trinidad (pop. 860 as of the 2020 census) could support a cop shop that employed five full-time officers and “several part-timers.” To put this in perspective, I live in a town with a population of 885 (according to the 2020 census) and all law enforcement support is provided by the county and that seems to be more than enough. No local has ever suggested the town needs its own PD, much less one staffed with 5-10 officers.
With the PD disbanded, law enforcement will be handled by the county, which (as is the case in my current home town) is probably enough to handle whatever criminal activity the town of Trinidad throws at it. The mayor of Trinidad (David Haws) seemed to be completely receptive of this disbanding, suggesting in his public statement that the PD had been a bit of problem for its entire existence.
He said: “There’s been a lot of neglect through the years. We are moving in a positive direction. We’ve got to get past all of this.”
This could mean a few things, but given the context of the disbanding, Haws seems to suggest the town was both over-policed and under-funded. And it’s easy to imagine the local PD had more power than a succession of small town mayors who probably took the job because someone needed to do it. Meanwhile, a bunch of cops with no real crime to fight continued to collect paychecks and abuse their power, with the town seemingly powerless to shut down the unnecessary agency itself.
No one needs a local cop shops when residents report [squints and re-squints at crime data] an average of eight(8)[!!!} crimes per year. The prosecution of town critics and the cop critics who support them make it clear the overstaffed agency had nothing better to do with its time than provide residents with nothing useful in exchange for their tax dollars.
