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Blue Grit Podcast: The Voice of Texas Law Enforcement
2024: Ranked #1 Law Podcast
Host: Tyler Owen and Clint McNear discussing topics, issues, and stories within the law enforcement community. TMPA is the voice of Texas Law Enforcement, focused on protecting those who serve. Since 1950, we have been defending the rights and interests of Texas Peace Officers by providing the best legal assistance in the country, effective lobbying at state and local levels, affordable training, and exemplary member support. As the largest law enforcement association in Texas, TMPA is proud to represent 33,000 local, county and state law enforcement officers.
Blue Grit Podcast: The Voice of Texas Law Enforcement
#105- "Pushing Back" with Kevin Lawrence
In this hard-hitting episode, TMPA Executive Director Kevin Lawrence addresses a growing concern: a particular media outlet that continues to push false narratives about law enforcement transparency and personnel files. Kevin lays out the facts, dismantling the spread of misinformation and highlighting what the law says about public records and officer privacy.
He stresses the importance of law enforcement not sitting quietly while our profession is misrepresented. Kevin calls on all officers, leaders, and supporters to push back against misleading headlines and defend the profession's integrity. It's a nonsensical conversation about the truth behind what is — and what isn’t- and why standing united matters now more than ever.
If you care about protecting your name, reputation, and the truth, this is an episode you don't want to miss.
email us at- bluegrit@tmpa.org
This media outlet that published this because I don't even consider them to be media decides to put up a banner headline that says they're trying to make law enforcement misconduct secret again. This information is going out to citizens, who I think are just being completely misled about what's going on in law enforcement, and we need to push back.
Speaker 2:Welcome back. Blue Grit watchers. Watchers, viewers, listeners, I'm your host, tyler owen, co-host today.
Speaker 1:The man, the myth, the legend, the executive director of tmpa kevin de lortz, we were just sitting here joking about the fact that I I don't talk loud enough yeah, yeah, I always get.
Speaker 2:I always get complaints when you're on about the volume never been accused of not talking loud enough.
Speaker 1:What's going on, man? Man, everything's going on about the volume.
Speaker 2:I've never been accused of not talking loud enough. What's going?
Speaker 1:on man man, everything's going on the legislature, you know, the circus is in town, full swing full swing At our T-LAC meeting this morning.
Speaker 2:T-lac meeting this morning.
Speaker 1:It's that time of the session where things are really just starting to percolate and so our team is busy stomping out brush fires here and trying to build up stuff over there and, you know, just trying to keep an eye on some other stuff. It's just so it's non-stop, like last week I was on I can't tell you how many different phone calls I was on about a bunch of bills that are just not going to pass anyway, but they've got members freaked out.
Speaker 2:I think it's hilarious because every time sessions in, I can always tell when sessions in. Uh, especially in our executive director's office, because he's got his whole wardrobe set up in the back corner for all of his suits and you never know when you're going to have to be rushed down to the Capitol to testify on a pro-law enforcement bill or try to kill a bill that may hurt law enforcement.
Speaker 1:Or to just stand on the steps of the Capitol screaming I promise you a chicken and egg, that's right.
Speaker 2:You can always tell when the session's in, though, man, I'm not telling everybody his age, but for anybody that knows, kevin, I don't know how you are not just whipped all the time. You're blowing and going. You've got the session full swing, you've got everything going. It's just you're a busy man, you're a busy man.
Speaker 1:Oh okay, you're a busy man. You're a busy man.
Speaker 2:Oh okay, I know people who tell you I am whipped all the time. That's a different matter. Yeah, yeah, so we got the texas peace, awesome world coming up april 26th you wanted to touch base on. That's kind of been moved up, uh, as prior years well here.
Speaker 1:Recently we've been doing it the last weekend in april rather than the first weekend in may, which is what it was originally. But this year it's been changed even more because it's been moved to Saturday instead of Sunday. So I just want to make sure that anybody who's planning on attending knows it's a Saturday this year, so don't show up on Sunday and wonder where is everybody.
Speaker 2:And man, this is my first year to be kind of included on the TPOM, the committee meetings, and just to kind of be a part of that and see the hard work and dedication that all those men and women put into that. It truly is amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know, in case anybody's not aware, a decade or more ago we created the committee. It was created by statute. Now there's only four voting members of the committee. Okay, that is TMPA Texas, fop the Concerns of Police Survivors, and CLEET. Okay, four voting members of the committee. Okay, that is tmpa texas, fop the concerns of police survivors, and cleat. Okay, those are the four voting members, but the non-voting members includes the governor's office, the lieutenant governor's office, the speaker's office, ticole.
Speaker 2:Um, there's several others, I can't even and so many volunteers that are kind of associated with cops and you know it's pretty cool and a lot of the work has fallen on TECL.
Speaker 1:But there's also the preservation board is a huge part of all this, because nothing happens on Capitol grounds without the preservation board approving all of it. And we're trying to build, add on to the memorial, the canine slash service animal memorial.
Speaker 2:Huge shout out to past president Lawncraft for a significant donation to assist with that construction of that, and an anonymous donor out of Baytown, texas, that came through another Baytown officer.
Speaker 1:So we've got money sitting waiting to go ahead and get that as soon as we get all the approvals done. Well, and we've been working on this for over a decade now and you know, nothing happens fast no, nothing happens fast in that building.
Speaker 2:That is that, that is for sure. Well, I came in. Uh, we, we spoke briefly on friday. There was an article let's also.
Speaker 1:Let's also talk about national police week coming up middle of may, national police week is is always the week that includes May the 15th, which is National Police Day. So that week now we will be going in on the 11th, staying until the 16th. But May the 13th is the Candlelight Vigil which will be on the National Mall. There's just not enough room to do it at the actual memorial anymore. May the 14th will be the Cops Gala at the Cops Conference and then May the 15th will be the ceremony on the Capitol Steps Capitol Grounds and I am told without a doubt President Trump will be there to address the audience. Oh, I don't doubt that one man.
Speaker 2:That's a bucket, that's a, that's definitely a bucket trip to go to that, experience it and be, you know, having conversations with friends and family there and inside a pub, and all of a sudden, a random you know pipe and drum come in.
Speaker 1:It's just, uh, man, it's a special week in my opinion every law enforcement officer should go at least once just to experience that I agree, it's a fantastic. It's horrible that we have to have such a ceremony. Yeah, but the fact of the matter is in our business, we have to have people who are willing to lay down their lives for their fellows, and so we should never, ever, ever, forget the sacrifices that they and their families have made. 100% agree, 100% agree.
Speaker 2:Ever, ever forget the sacrifices that they and their families have made? A hundred percent agree. A hundred percent agree. Speaking of the sacrifices that our law enforcement make. Every day, you read an article that it didn't sit well with you and we're going to discuss that today.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's not that it didn't sit well with me, it was that I saw it.
Speaker 1:I just saw the headline and I immediately called Tyler and said I want to get on something that I want to scream and holler because it just made me so mad it's about and I'm not even going to name the outlet that published this because I don't even consider them to be media but anytime something is published or posted or whatever, it starts getting picked up and reposted and reposted by whoever. And so this kind of information, this disinformation, is going out to citizens who I think are just being completely misled about what's going on in law enforcement, and we need to push back. This article was about a specific bill that is pending in the Texas legislature. That would, and it takes a little bit of explaining, but in agencies in Texas that have municipal civil service, there are two personnel files. There's the A file and the G file. The A file is a public record and it includes when officers have received commendations, promotions, demotions, suspensions, discipline. It's all in there. It's all in there. It's all public record. The G file is not a public record and it's for stuff that doesn't need to be made public. It is for whenever somebody makes a complaint about an officer and the complaint is not sustained, whenever an officer is investigated and is determined the officer didn't do anything wrong, that goes into a G file. That shouldn't be public information. There's a lot of reasons why, but civil service agencies currently have that. This bill would now make that applicable to all law enforcement agencies in Texas.
Speaker 1:To allow A and G files, this media outlet use the term loosely decides to put up a banner headline that says they're trying to make law enforcement misconduct secret again, and nothing could be further from the truth. Misconduct is what officers get disciplined and fired for, and that's all public record. False allegations are not misconduct. Correct Quit, label them that way. Correct Quit trying to make people believe that every time somebody cause I got a news for you the overwhelming majority of complaints filed against law enforcement officers are not sustained. And just think about that a minute. Who has the incentive to make false complaints about law enforcement officers? People who got caught doing something wrong, that's right. It's got to be the cop's fault, it can't be their fault. I've been in this business, as you very succinctly pointed out, for a while now.
Speaker 1:You know just a couple years, we will say many moons have passed. Yes, many moons have passed. So I have a lot of experience in this. So I have a lot of experience in this and as a line-level officer, as a supervisor, as a manager. I've seen and dealt with and heard the complaints. I've had them filed against me. By the way, I got sued one time by a guy that I arrested for murder and he sued me claiming that I damaged his reputation by arresting him for murder. Oh, my gosh, yeah.
Speaker 1:And of course, as soon as the grand jury finished the indictment, the lawsuit went away. But the lawsuit was a trick, it was a ploy to try and force me to give a deposition on a criminal case so that they could try to get you know.
Speaker 2:I do think it's important also to point out that when our members and members of law enforcement, when they are working in areas that are economically more challenged than others, to me, when I was managing in law enforcement and a line-level employee, I seemed to get more complaints in those specific areas, and the reality is this is that it's because law enforcement presence is heavier in those areas than areas that wouldn't necessarily be economically challenged, and I think it's important to kind of, you know, bring that up, because that's where the fairness comes in you know that's interesting because my experience has been more complaints came from the more affluent of our citizens, because they they just don't believe law enforcement should be taking action against them.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and they're the ones that they've always. They're buddies with some member of the city council, or their kid goes to school with the city manager's kid, or whatever, and they're the ones that would file the bogus complaints against law enforcement.
Speaker 2:What I've seen and felt and been a part of is that those necessarily aren't on paper. Those are the calling the chief or the city manager and then making a phone call Okay, agreed, used to be, they weren't on paper.
Speaker 1:But nowadays agencies put everything, they document everything. It's not like back in the day when somebody would call and say, hey, officer Martinez was rude to me and, by the way, this is based on a real case. So I sat down with this person and and said, okay, explain to me what officer martinez did. That was rude. And she was like, well, it's not really so much what he did, it was the way he talked to me and I'm like, okay, what did he say to you? And it took me a while and she finally said it was. It was just a look on his face and I was like, okay, yeah, yeah, did he look like he just didn't care? Yeah, you know because I got news for you folks.
Speaker 1:First of all, this was on the traffic stop where the officer martinez was writing a ticket. Most cops don't want to write tickets anyway. They hate writing tip. But they're told you have to go write a certain. But they can't be told you have to write a certain number of tickets. That would violate the quota law, which is another issue. But they're told this is part of your job, you have to go write tickets. So cops write tickets because it is in fact part of their job, not because they want to write tickets I agree, and that was my biggest complaint as a motor jock.
Speaker 2:Uh, it took me a while, you know, I think we all can agree any watcher, listener, viewer out there that that that is, um, that's a cop right now. That hits that five-year mark. It's almost like you go through five phases in your career. You've got the rookie phase where, man, you're just ready to go, you know class C, arrest at a time and just take over the world, and then you've got kind of an in-between and then you have what's called what my sergeant called was the rooster. That's where you think you know everything and you can pretty much get by with doing the job. But and you can pretty much get by with doing the job, but you don't have the veteran status. Now then there's another gap between rooster and then there's the vet. That's the old salty dog that knows the job, and I was in this probably right before the rooster phase and has figured out he or she doesn't know everything.
Speaker 1:That's right and therefore is never, ever completely.
Speaker 2:And it had everything to do with my demeanor. I wasn't, and I'll tell you the. The number one thing that I learned is I didn't show compassion. I didn't show compassion during a traffic stop, even though they were in violation of law and I was writing this citation. I didn't show compassion in the sense that my simple task in that three minute traffic stop was their worst time that week, that month and possibly that year that I'm costing that individual 350 dollars. And so once I finally got that through my thick uh, my thick head, I uh, my complaints went down okay, but when?
Speaker 1:who explained that to you in the police academy, by the way, oh?
Speaker 2:it was always explained. It just wasn't explained to the manner of what the sergeant did. Right, like everybody else in fto, everything you learn in the academy, you can toss that shit out the window. Worker's learn how to be published.
Speaker 1:So they tried to explain it. It just never got through to you because you didn't have a point of reference to operate from. And let's face it, most 21, 24, 27-year-old I'll call them kids, thank you that are getting into this business. It does take a while. There's a reason why we need to have an extended field training officer period. There needs to be. There's a reason why officers need to ride with veteran officers and have somebody to model themselves after. It's not. You cannot hire somebody off the streets, put them in a uniform and say go out and police, which is the way they did it when I first started. But that's another story. It takes a while for folks to learn the nuances of the job. So, yes, we do need to be willing to listen to complaints from our citizens. We need to understand that cops don't always do it as well as they could do it. We need to take them as learning opportunities. We do not need to put it into a public record that now will remove that officer from law enforcement altogether.
Speaker 1:Under the Brady and Giglio and Michael Morton acts. We are forcing good cops out of law enforcement by trying to assume and this is coming from defense attorneys, it's coming from activists, it's coming from the media. We want to assume that every time a complaint is filed against a law enforcement officer, the officer is guilty, and I'm willing to bet that, of our 71,000 followers on Facebook, not all of them are cops. The ones of you who are not law enforcement officers may be surprised to find out that in Texas there's 2,800 law enforcement agencies and that maybe 150 of those agencies cops have a right to due process when it comes to complaints filed against those officers Only about 150 of 2,600 and some odd other agencies. There is zero due process for our cops when it comes to complaints filed against them, discipline being taken against them. All the more reason we need to have the A file and the G file at every single agency.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree, and me working for a city and then a sheriff's office, my heart goes out for these deputies that also work under political sheriffs that are elected because it's enhanced, especially ones that are not civil service. But when the sheriff gets a complaint from a constituent it's way different than a police chief having to answer to a city council Way different.
Speaker 1:Right and even more different if you happen to work for DPS. Because let's face it, if you get a ticket from a DPS trooper in Yules hugh, texas, who do you complain to? That's right, I did the region office. If you can go find the region office, you find that that troopers, sergeant or lieutenant, whoever, make the complaint, but you don't go to your local city council, you don't go. You don't run into city hall or the commissioner's court to file a complaint. It takes a lot of effort and I will tell you dps has a process on their website to explain Commissioner's Court to file a complaint. It takes a lot of effort and I will tell you DPS has a process on their website that explains to you how to file a complaint against a DPS trooper. But they don't have the same political influence. Nobody's going to call the governor and say by the way, I want you to do something about this trooper that wrote me a ticket in Muleshoe because I didn't like the look on his face.
Speaker 2:Which is why the beauty of them being state police A lot of times for the viewer out there that's not law enforcement or watcher or listener. That's the main reason why you see Texas Rangers investigate officer-involved shootings because they're the neutral party, they're the state entity. There's not really a kind of affiliation they can bring in Hypothetically here in Austin. Let's say, kevin lived up in Waco and we got into a shooting right here in Austin. We would ask that Ranger to come down. He's not a part of our department. So that's why you see a lot of times an outside entity investigating that department.
Speaker 1:Right and we want transparency. And again, I've made this argument a million times and I will make it until the day I die Law enforcement does a better job of policing our own than any other profession that's out there. We're not perfect. We don't always get it right. We do sometimes hire people that shouldn't have been hired. More often we have people that get into the job and they just they go sour on us, they go bad on us. We have to be diligent and vigilant about weeding those people out and keeping them out of business.
Speaker 1:Nobody, but nobody, hates a bad cop more than a good cop. I agree, we don't want bad cops in the business, but the percentage of bad cops, the percentage of times that cops don't do it right, is so much smaller than the Austin Justice Coalition or Campaign. Zero, would you have, or defense attorneys would have, you believe, I agree, I agree, which is why we need the G file. Campaign zero, would you have, or defense attorneys would have, you believe, I agree, I agree, which is why we need the g file at every law enforcement agency. And and, by the way, your cops by and large, as you know, when you deal with your cops at the local level, 80 of our citizens will tell you our cops are just decent, honest, hard-working people trying to do the right thing. And you're exactly right, that's who you have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully this will get, I guess. What's the status on this bill? Do we know?
Speaker 1:It looks like the bill is going to pass. I mean, you can never, ever. You know, I don't think it's actually been heard in committee yet. I think it's got enough support. It's going to pass.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, we hope it will. And, like I said, every Monday morning we're in those TLEC meetings listening to bills that are pro-law enforcement, that are not good for law enforcement, and so that's an interesting thing to be a part of too, to see all of the hard work that we tmpa, hplu, harris county deputy association and other law enforcement associations work together to get good legislation for law enforcement passed and then try to block bad legislation for law enforcement.
Speaker 1:But what are we currently tracking about 5 000 bills? The ones, just the ones that we're tracking as they go through the legislative process. That's crazy. It is, that's crazy.
Speaker 2:Well, you guys, take care, Our conference is coming up, 2025 conference, the 75th anniversary of TMPA. Not the conference anniversary, because we've had some. I guess the COVID year, what was the other one? We had Some other past presidents that we're a couple years in, I think.
Speaker 1:technically, though, this will be, in fact, our 75th conference on our 75th anniversary. Okay, it kind of works out that way, because the first one was not year one, it was year zero. Got you Right? That makes sense, yeah. But since we did miss one during COVID covid, I think our 75th conference is happening on our 75th anniversary.
Speaker 2:well, uh, it's gonna be a good time. Houston hot, is it? Houston hot? Is that? What's the hyatt? Hyatt, downtown 1200, louisiana, houston, texas, downtown houston, it'd be a good time. July 26th through the 28th uh, that'll be our 75th tmpa conference. Mark your calendar, mark your calendar. Mark your calendar. So anything else you got boss? Yeah, let's get some rest. Yeah, let's get some rest. You guys, take care, stay safe. God bless you and, as always, may God bless Texas and watch your six no-transcript.
