March 14, 2001

Against HB 837 (Tillery)

Against new loopholes in Dallas’ police disciplinary process

 
Written testimony by Scott Henson, ACLU of Texas
 

Summary

HB 837 sets rules for how investigations of police officers by the Dallas Police Department may be conducted, granting them numerous special rights unavailable to any other target of a police investigation. Furter, HB 837 requires that if any rule is violated, then any departmental punishment must be reversed and no information from the investigation may be used in a criminal prosecution.

* * *

 
First, this should be a local matter. If the Dallas municipal authorities wanted this process, they already have full authority to implement it, since they’re not governed by Chapter 143 of the Local Government Code. The ACLU believes the Legislature should not usurp local authority in this matter.
 
Further, the ACLU believes the time has come for a thorough examination of how Texas deals with the police disciplinary process. Too often, police officers who have engaged in serious misconduct or even committed crimes are ordered back on the force by judges and arbitrators because of provisions such as HB 837. The part that concerns ACLU most in this bill is not any specific rule about how to conduct an investigation, but the strict language at the very end which reads as follows:

5-8 (l) If the head of the police department or any investigator
5-9 violates any provision of this section while conducting an
5-10 investigation, the municipality shall reverse any punitive action
5-11 taken based on the investigation, including a reprimand, and any
5-12 information obtained during the investigation may not be admitted
5-13 into evidence in any proceeding against the police officer.

Union lawyers frequently use these types of laws to force municipalities to return bad cops to the force, even if the department thinks they should be fired. A district judge ruled that Austin Police Officer Samuel Ramirez must be reinstated at APD because the department missed a civil service notification deadline – this after the department’s disciplinary process found he’d committed “sexual assault.” (The execution of her order is pending the outcome of Ramirez’s criminal trial which begins this month.) In Wichita Falls, union attorneys recently overturned a demotion because of a technicality concerning deadlines in the civil service code. While designed ostensibly to protect labor rights of police officers, inevitably unions use these types of provisions to help bad cops wiggle out of serious sustained allegations of misconduct.

Worse, HB 837’s language is so broad it appears to preclude using evidence in “any proceeding,” including criminal proceedings, if any of these rules are violated. That extends protections from criminal prosecution to officers that are enjoyed by no other class of citizens, and it is improper. Police are not above the law, and statutes like HB 837 make it more difficult for the police to police themselves.

Most cops never commit any serious misconduct. But this bill and all other bills that tell local police departments, “follow these rules to the letter or you cannot discipline,” have the effect of keeping bad cops on the force, and lowering both officer morale and public esteem for local police departments. The use of such rigid restrictions on officer discipline, in the long run, should be re-evaluated. For now, please reject HB 837 and any other bills that let officers avoid appropriate discipline by local departments.