Bad apples can so easily skirt accountability
For the love of God, how can Pete Arredondo have successfully appealed his record in the state database that tracks law enforcement officers who are fired?
Arredondo’s utter cowardice and incompetence as the police chief of the Uvalde school district were among the primary reasons it took law enforcement more than an hour to confront the shooter who killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary. From waiting for equipment he already had to spending 40 minutes looking for keys to a door that wasn’t locked to leaving his radio behind so he couldn’t hear the pleading 911 calls from inside the classroom, Arredondo failed his most critical assignment as the commanding officer that day.
When the disgraced chief, who had the audacity to call his firing a “public lynching,” appealed his record, the school district failed to show up to the hearing and his less-thanhonorable discharge was upgraded by default.
Less than honorable? Try, “borderline criminal.”
It took family and friends of those killed at Robb Elementary three months of showing up to get Arredondo fired. They held vigils. They attended city council meetings. They camped outside government offices. “Turn in your badge and step down,” shouted 10-year-old survivor Caitlyne Gonzales at the school board that finally voted to terminate his employment.
The minimum the Legislature can do this session in the wake of the worst school shooting in the state’s history is to fix the system that tracks bad cops.
The broken system allows virtually any fired officer to get a new job with one of the state’s 2,800 police agencies.
Whenever an officer commits a high-profile case of misconduct, the defense we so often hear from police advocates is not to sully the law enforcement profession at large with the actions of one “bad apple.” But what do we do when bad apples can so easily skirt accountability for their actions? When even the most egregious instances of bad behavior are excused by clearing a simple administrative hurdle? In December, Hearst Newspapers’ Eric Dexheimer reported that a San Antonio officer fired for feeding a feces sandwich to a homeless person had been hired a mere four months later by another law enforcement agency.
These “wandering officers” slip through the cracks in part because of a confidential red flag system that is inadequately screening bad cops, and a toothless state agency, the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which has little to no authority to decertify officers who commit gross misconduct. In the last three fiscal years, TCOLE found criminal history deficiencies in nearly 13 percent of its law enforcement agency audits, including the failure to correctly order criminal history checks on licensees and allowing potentially unsafe individuals to be employed in communities, jails and schools.
At the root of this problem is the “F-5” form. The chief administrator of a law enforcement agency is required to fill it out and send it to TCOLE after an officer is terminated, yet the discharge designations obscure crucial details about why the officer was dismissed.
Officers who receive a dishonorable discharge can appeal that designation to TCOLE. Yet these hearings happen behind closed doors, with records that are also confidential. Most of the discharge upgrades happen by default, due to the firing law enforcement agency not appearing in court.
Texas 2036, a nonprofit think tank, reviewed records from the State Office of Administrative Hearings. Three weeks ago, the documents show, Arredondo won his appeal by default when the school district apparently did not contest it. This means that his discharge designation could have been upgraded, either from dishonorable to general or from general to honorable.
After auditing TCOLE, a Legislature committee in November recommended doing away with discharge categories in the F-5 system. Instead, the commission would support a bare separation document: “Chief Arredondo no longer works here, effective August 2022,” without any description of the underlying circumstances that led to his termination. The thinking goes that because the F-5 system is so faulty, why not just get rid of it altogether? The Legislature passed a bill in 2021 that made significant improvements to the hiring process for law enforcement officers, including opening up confidential records for hiring agencies to look at and requiring criminal history background checks. With all of this information now at the disposal of law enforcement agencies, there is seemingly less utility for a one-sheet form that barely tells you anything about an officer’s past behavior.
We disagree.
Instead, we urge the Legislature to require law enforcement agencies to provide as much information as possible on the F-5. Texas 2036 recommends lawmakers provide “neutral and basic” reasons for an officer’s separation from their agency; require all law enforcement agencies to maintain uniform, detailed personnel records; require agencies who hire officers from out of state to check the National Decertification Index before hiring an officer with a checkered work history; and most importantly, make all of this information available to the public.
To us, that seems reasonable. Last fall, Caitlyne Gonzales asked her mother to take her to the cemetery where her friends from Robb Elementary are buried. At Jayce Luevanos’s plot she saw a new painting of a dinosaur. At the grave of her best friend Jackie Cazares, she sang “Happy Birthday” while Facetiming with a classmate recovering in the hospital.
These children are showing up for one another. Our legislators must show up for them as well and reform the agencies that failed to keep them safe.
Disgraced Uvalde police chief won his appeal by default.