I keep rereading this story hoping it will make some ence arlington/article120067518.html. Hasn’t helped. A total of sixteen officers are accused of falsifying reports by reporting they made traffic stops that never occurred. Nine have been fired, four resigned and four remain unresolved. With multiple layers of oversight, I can’t figure out how they thought they would get away with this. My first thought is that the “best and brightest” were not involved in the scheme.

Texas got sold a bill of goods on the non-issue of racial profiling. As a result, all police contacts must be documented. This documentation can take the form of a Big Chief Tablet and a number two pencil or via video recording in the patrol car. It sounds like APD also requires a shift or daily activity report that is kept and submitted via MDT (computer). In addition, there is the citation, written warning, or field interview card that accompanies each stop.

Add in there is the dispatch record where the officer reports that he is out on a traffic/pedestrian stop.  The corresponding GPS locator indicator that reports the actual position of the patrol car, rather than the reported position. Finally, there is the capacity, in some systems, where authorized supervisors can activate any dash cam at any time to monitor an officer’s activity.

The camera may not pick up an officer’s rendezvous with his favorite “fender lizard” but the microphone  is sensitive enough to pick up the sound of a zipper being unzipped and various terms of endearment that cops are wont to use at such times such as,”oh baby, oh darling”.

There is so much that isn’t reported here, that it is hard to tell what was going on. None of these controls are secret. On their face they seem adequate. My first thought is that the controls in place in APD were not being monitored and no action was being taken by the administration when it would have been appropriate to do so. The second thing I wonder about is did these guys work together, the same shift, sergeant area, assignment or had they all traveled through the same situation.

I am not ready to put this on the Chief. In my experience, the normal reaction would be for a Chief confronted with such a shit storm to sweep it all under the rug, instead, he is pursuing job actions and criminal prosecutions. His fault, if there is one, is he trusted some of his subordinates to much and now he is getting the benefit of that trust.

The used to be an animal in police management called a staff inspector. This individual had no command responsibility, yet outranked every other officer in the department because his authority came from the Chief. His job was to keep the machine (organization) running at peak performance. One facet of the operation could affect disparate parts. The staff inspector was there to identify what worked and what didn’t work. He made a judgment; was it poor design, poor implementation or a personnel issue.  He then identified steps to correct the problem. Under the current system of department heads, one would expect each to be a zealous defender of his/het particular program, sometimes at the expense of achieving overall goals.  Maybe it is time to bring the Staff Inspector back.