New Waelder police chief details department’s shortcomings, addresses fixes

Waelder Police Chief Jim Taylor is back for his second stint as the top law enforcement officer in this Gonzales County community and during his first Waelder City Council meeting on Tuesday, May 13, he laid the cupboard bare on issues that need to be addressed within the department.

Chief among those are an evidence room in complete disarray with widespread cross-contamination as well as prior illegal accessing of federal governmental records that must remain confidential and can only be accessed for certain purposes, Taylor told the aldermen, who appeared stunned by the frank disclosure of departmental shortcomings.

“It's only fair to let you guys know where we're at. We're rebuilding everything — reputations, everything — everything's being rebuilt, every single thing,” Taylor said. “We are rebuilding everything legally from the ground up — again, legally from the ground up.”

Taylor said when he comes as the new chief into a police department that “has got a lot of issues,” he always contacts the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE) to come in and do a full audit of the department’s operations. He did the same during his first stint as Waelder police chief from 2010 through 2013.

“I want to start with clean slate,” Taylor said. “I want to know what the issues are. I want to correct them so we don't get fined. Those fines, folks, they start at $1,000 a day per violation. The last time I was here, the total bill was $5 million in fines. That was 40 years of mismanaged evidence.”

Taylor spoke about evidence being “sacred” and that it must be stored in an appropriate manner, especially when it is evidence involving crimes of a violent or sexual nature.

“That evidence has to be available pretty much forever,” Taylor said. “You have to store it properly. It can't be cross contaminated. If it is, it's impeached and that means it's no good in court. That means you've got a potential victim that's not going to get justice, and you've got a criminal that's going to go free to do some more crime.

“Evidence is sacred. It's sacred. What could be more sacred than somebody's guilt or innocence?”

He said the Waelder Police Department has two evidence rooms and that both are in “horrible” condition.

“It's horrible. It's just kind of piled in there and there’s cross contamination,” Taylor said. “I’ve gotta go to the DA and say, ‘Come down here and look, because this is the evidence that you're not gonna be able to use in the criminal prosecutions from our community.’ I’ve got to do that and that shouldn't be done.

“It's a simple thing to do (to store evidence). Who knows whose fault it is? I don't really care. My job is just to fix it, you know.”

Taylor said it will take him a minimum of a year and a half to get the evidence room into proper order.

“I've done this three times and I've consulted with multiple agencies across the state on the state of their evidence room,” Taylor said. “Generally the minimum time is a year and a half. You have to go through and identify every single piece of evidence. You can't just go to a judge and say, ‘Hey, you know, this is a mess. Let's just get rid of all of it.’ That's illegal, you know.

“Let's go through item by item, make a good, fair, honest attempt to identify each item and make sure what case it goes to and if that case has been disposed of. In some instances, you can get a destruction order. In others, as in the case of a sexual assault, you have to hang on to it for 40 years, or until 10 years after the perpetrator or 10 years after the victim dies. It's gotta be held onto forever. It's like homicide evidence. I've got some evidence from a lady that was killed here in a train accident several years ago. It stays there forever. It never, ever leaves our custody.”

Meanwhile, Taylor said there is evidence from burglaries and other lesser offenses that have been kept by the department for as long as 12 years when the law states the department has 30 days to return recovered property to its rightful owner.

“It's unacceptable — completely unacceptable!” Taylor said. “It's just wrong. You're basically stealing. What is that? It's depriving the rightful owner of the use of their own property, so you're stealing. Let's say your house is burglarized, and your television set is stolen and you can't afford to replace it. Well, it's recovered. And what if the police department were using that to watch TV in their own offices? I'm not joking! It's illegal, it's wrong and it's morally wrong on top of that!”

Taylor said there have been allegations made that someone accessed the FACT Clearinghouse in violation of state and/or federal law on multiple occasions. The FACT Clearinghouse is a repository of DPS and FBI fingerprint-based criminal history results and allows authorized entities access to that for information about police officer applicants or for working criminal cases only.

“It can only be used for law enforcement applicants or criminal histories on suspects. That's all,” Taylor said. “It's a felony to access that for any other reason, a felony, and there's a series of misdemeanors too. There's some alleged behavior in the past that's gone on here in violation of that.

“I contacted the non-criminal justice unit at the Texas Department of Public Safety and they are investigating. They're doing an electronic audit, and they're going to come down here and do a physical audit. This is a fair notice statement, because nobody here is guilty of anything. This is an umbrella for everybody saying this is illegal. We can't. Don't even suggest it. It’s not your job to know; it's our job to know that, and it's our job to comply with that.”

Violations can also result in the pulling of an agency’s ORI, or Originating Agency Identifier, which is the number used to identify the agency which is requesting criminal history information and accessing the National Crime Information Computer or Texas Crime Information Computer systems.

“When you violate the FACT program, that ORI can be deleted,” Taylor said. “When that happens, there's no more police department. It's gone. In Texas now, if your police department is dissolved, you can't just have a city council meeting to say, ‘Hey, we want it back.’ The state comes in and they want to see your architectural plans for you new police department.

“They want to approve all of your dispatch and that starts at $5 million for a dispatch program. Police departments like ours are grandfathered in so we can use the sheriff's department, so we don't have to have that $5 million to come up with towers and radios and engineers and everything else.”

Taylor told council members he also wants to put into effect several things that would help build up the department’s image and numbers. First is to begin a vigorous recruitment effort that includes visiting area police academies. Second is to look at community outreach programs, including performing welfare checks for elderly and disabled who live alone in the community and feel they may go unnoticed if something were to happen to them.

The department will also look at beginning a Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program with the Waelder ISD as well as beginning a law enforcement explorer program with high school students.

“It's always bothered me that we can't get any local people that are qualified to be peace officers in our own town,” Taylor said. “We have to go outside of town to hire people. That's the beginning of a pool that accepts people from the ages of 14 to 21 and the goal is to teach them law enforcement is not about carrying guns. It's about community outreach. We teach them how to fingerprint. We teach them how to manage evidence on a small scale.”

Taylor also spoke about being active in the 1033 program, managed by the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO) of the Department of Defense, which allows the transfer of excess military property to state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies, as well as developing strong relationships with other law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, the U.S. Marshal’s Office and the Secret Service.