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San Patricio County Chief Deputy Adrian Rodriguez
CBPOA President
We welcome the Nixon Police Department as a first-time host for the summer 2023 meeting. Location TBA at a later date.
Bee County Sheriff's Office, Beeville Police Department and the Refugio County Sheriff's Office will close out 2023 hosting our fall meeting. Location TBA at a later date.
Click on the "Our Directors and History" page to see our updated list.
By Sarah Roebuck
Police1
PLANT CITY, Fla. — Just before Mother's Day, Hillsborough County Sheriff's Master Deputy Daniel "Red" Jones had a sweet reunion with a baby he helped deliver on the side of a highway.
The reunion happened Friday, nearly two weeks after Jones delivered baby Lexela on Highway 60 in Plant City, Fox News reports.
The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office shared photos of Jones holding the baby alongside the baby's parents.
"No, her name is NOT Red, but “Little Red” is a cool nickname! What do y’all think?!" the sheriff's office wrote in a Facebook post.
The baby's birth was captured on Jones' body-worn camera. It was the third time in his career he helped deliver a baby
By Libor Jany
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — Most traffic enforcement in Los Angeles should be done by civilian workers, but only in tandem with major infrastructure upgrades that improve safety along city streets that are among the nation's deadliest.
Those are the conclusions of a long-delayed report from the city transportation department that has yet to be released. The Times reviewed a draft of the document, which has been in the works for nearly three years, since the City Council first raised the prospect of removing traffic duties from the Los Angeles Police Department.
Among the recommendations put forth by the city report is investing in so-called "self-enforcing infrastructure," such as narrower streets.
The debate over what role police should have in enforcing traffic safety comes amid an alarming yearlong rise in road deaths and injuries. It illustrates both the promise and the challenge of removing armed officers from traffic safety duties.
Some transportation safety advocates say persistent traffic violence, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, shows that the city needs to crack down harder on reckless driving.
Supporters of criminal justice reform argue for a less punitive approach. They say those communities have historically borne the brunt of over-aggressive policing, which they contend hasn't made the streets any safer.
And they allege that, even when such encounters don't end in violence, the fines that often result can send people into spiraling debt.
Among the recommendations put forth by the city report is investing in so-called "self-enforcing infrastructure," such as narrower streets, dedicated bike lanes and more clearly marked pedestrian crosswalks.
Such measures naturally slow the flow of traffic and discourage drivers from speeding or breaking other road laws. Much like the Vision Zero initiative — unveiled in 2015 by then-Mayor Eric Garcetti to end traffic deaths within a decade — they would increase safety and reduce the need for active enforcement in "high-injury network corridors, low-income communities, and communities of color," the report said.
While the city could build on the existing Vision Zero model, the report said, it should be less reliant on law enforcement.
The city could, for example, use unarmed civilians to enforce "safety-related traffic violations" such as speeding, in the same vein as cities such as Berkeley, Oakland and Philadelphia, the report recommends.
At the same time, the city should consider "means-based" fee models — such as vouchers to repair broken taillights — for traffic violators, measures that "advance traffic safety objectives and do not perpetuate enforcement disparities."
From the chronic problem of people running stop signs to a rise in sideshows that occasionally lead to injuries — such as street takeovers or drag racing — the work group found that the "aggressiveness of drivers towards nondrivers, including the unhoused, is a growing problem in Los Angeles."
Headlines describing road violence involving pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists have piled up in recent months, including one case last month in which police say a possibly impaired driver barreled into a mother and her 6-year-old daughter as they walked to school in Mid-Wilshire. The mother was killed and the girl was critically injured.
According to Los Angeles Police Department data, 312 people were killed in traffic collisions in 2022, a 5% increase over the previous year and a 29% increase over 2020.
The city's streets remain particularly deadly for pedestrians and bicyclists, with 159 people killed in collisions involving pedestrians and motorists last year. This is a 19% rise compared with 2021, LAPD data show. An additional 20 people died in collisions involving bicyclists and motorists, an 11% rise.
The traffic carnage outpaced national trends.
Even among the most ardent transportation advocates, reducing those numbers in a city as car-dependent as Los Angeles seems like an impossibly tall task.
"As a city, we get an F grade for our traffic, for the amount of traffic violations and our ability to curb serious fatalities and injuries," said Damian Kevitt, executive director of Streets Are For Everyone. "I understand that we've got a housing crisis, I don't disagree that we're prioritizing that. But we [also] have a public health traffic violence crisis."
Local officials, he said, need to find an approach to traffic safety that doesn't repeat the harm of past efforts.
"The truth is, I don't think anyone has a definite answer of what is that sweet spot; how do we balance that? Because it's not equitable to have people dying on the streets of Los Angeles," he said, adding that pedestrians of color are at higher risk of being run over "because they're the ones who are walking the most or biking the most because they can't afford a car."
Experts say speed is a major factor in many serious crashes, and so reducing it can lead to fewer traffic deaths.
Jessica Hutton, an engineer with the Kansas City, Missouri, firm Burns & McDonnell, said most drivers decide how fast to drive based on unconscious cues from a road's design and surroundings. Thus, some cities can employ "a little bit of psychology" by designing "self-enforcing" roads that regulate speeds through changes, for example, to the width of a roadway or shoulder or the creation of more intersections.
The debate over the role of law enforcement in traffic incidents stretches back decades but intensified in the wake of George Floyd's murder in 2020 at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis and the ensuing nationwide reckoning in which critics challenged some long-held assumptions around policing.
The draft report calls for further expanding the LAPD's restrictions on so-called pretextual stops — using minor traffic violations as a reason to pull over vehicles and search them for evidence of more serious crimes. Such stops were already drastically scaled back after a Times investigation found that the department stopped and searched Black and Latino drivers at higher rates than white motorists.
Department officials have admitted these stops netted few arrests and undermined public trust.
Still, police officials around the U.S. have been slow to rein in the practice too much, saying that it is still a tool for getting guns and drugs off the streets.
LAPD officials have said they would be willing to relinquish certain traffic duties if they are picked up by another agency. But enforcement remains a top priority, they say, citing among other reasons the inherent dangers of traffic stops and a recent rise in accidents.
LAPD Chief Michel Moore said that "finding alternatives to a police response [to certain incidents] is something that the department is very much interested in."
"If DOT [Los Angeles Department of Transportation] were to pick that work up, I think we'd welcome it," he said.
He pointed out that teams of mental health workers already respond to some calls involving people in crisis, without police present, and that officers no longer "take traffic collision reports for anything other than the most serious traffic accidents."
At the same time, he added, any changes must be weighed against "safety risk issues" posed in certain traffic encounters.
Selling the proposed changes to the Los Angeles Police Protective League is another matter. Certain changes may have to be negotiated through collective bargaining, the report points out. And while the League, which is in contract talks with city leaders, has signaled its willingness to stop sending officers to certain low-level enforcement tasks, traffic duty is not one of them.
Even if Los Angeles wanted to put traffic enforcement into the hands of civilians, the assumption is that under the state vehicle code, such duties could only be handled by licensed peace officers. But the report argues that there are "plausible legal arguments that the vehicle code does not limit the City's discretion in this area."
The city Traffic Department already employs civilian "traffic officers," who direct traffic and enforce parking restrictions, according to the report. While they are not technically peace officers, they have the authority to issue parking tickets and to "perform other related duties."
Among those responsibilities is arresting "individuals without a warrant for a limited but varying list of civil violations related to taxis and ride-shares and other violations related to streets and sidewalks such as causing obstructions or dumping of prohibited substances," according to the report.
LADOT did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The department has said the pandemic has worsened its staffing issues. Connie Llanos, the agency's interim general manager, said during a recent budget presentation that her agency has 68 traffic officer vacancies. LADOT is also seeking new funding to expand its speed bump program to more locations around the city, including near schools.
Any next steps would probably require state legislative action, the report said. Policymakers would also need to get buy-in from communities that were "disproportionately burdened" by "high fees and privacy issues" and by past attempts at automated traffic enforcement, such as Los Angeles' defunct and controversial red-light camera traffic enforcement program.
The report's authors looked to models in other cities that, instead of deploying armed police, have tackled traffic safety by reinvesting in street improvements and educating the public while exploring alternative methods for holding motorists accountable.
Berkeley, for instance, has been developing a new division that aims to send unarmed representatives to certain traffic incidents, instead of police, as the city works toward its goal of reducing racial disparities in traffic stops and ending serious crashes by 2028.
In Philadelphia, officials voted to adopt a model of enforcement used in New Zealand, in which minor traffic violations are handled by unarmed public safety "officers" who work for that city's transportation department.
___
©2023 Los Angeles Times.
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Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
By Domingo Ramirez Jr.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
LAKE WORTH, Texas — On Nov. 27, 2021, bartender Cala Richardson served eight double vodka cocktails to Dylan Molina in less than three hours at Fuzzy’s Taco Shop in Lake Worth, according to police.
Richardson, 26, of Sansom Park, ignored signs that Molina was intoxicated and she didn’t keep him from leaving and driving away, police said a newly released video shows.
Molina later crashed his vehicle into the car of Euless police Detective Alex Cervantes, killing him and severely injuring his wife and two children, according to an arrest warrant affidavit released this week by Lake Worth police.
Richardson surrendered to authorities in Parker County earlier this month after a warrant was issued for her in the 2021 case.
She is charged with one count of sale to certain persons, a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail including a $4,000 fine if convicted.
Molina was indicted in February 2022 and pleaded guilty in January to intoxication manslaughter and three counts of intoxication assault. He was sentenced to 15 years on the manslaughter charge and 10 years each on assaults. The sentences will be served concurrently.
The security video from inside Fuzzy’s first shows Molina walk through a door behind the bar from an area that was supposed to be restricted to only employees. Richardson spots Molina behind the bar and gestures for him to go back to his seat.
Molina stumbles, and Richardson helps him to his feet, the surveillance video shows. He then goes back to the customer side of the bar while Richardson walks through the door behind the bar.
Seconds later, Molina leaves his drink on the bar and walks to the parking lot. Minutes later, he crashed his car into the Cervantes family’s vehicle at the intersection of Boat Club Road and Rocky Point Trail.
The video shows Richardson came back to the bar area and saw Molina was gone. She looked into the parking lot and then removed his last drink from the bar.
The warrant written by Lake Worth Detective R. Urbanek provided these details:
Molina arrived at Fuzzy’s at 10:37 a.m. on Nov. 27, 2021, and stayed there about two hours and 50 minutes.
Here’s the breakdown on the beverages he drink which were vodka/Redbull mixed drinks served in pint-sized glassware:
▪ 10:40 a.m., first drink, 16 minutes
▪ 10:56 a.m., second drink, 20 minutes
▪ 11:16 a.m., third drink, 23 minutes
▪ 11:39 a.m., fourth drink, 24 minutes
▪ 12:03 p.m., fifth drink, 29 minutes
▪ 12:32 p.m., sixth drink, 22 minutes
▪ 12:54 p.m., seventh drink, 18 minutes
▪ 1:12 p.m., eighth drink
Molina started his 2021 Jeep Wrangler at 1:30 p.m. and left the taco shop, 6010 Azle Ave. in Lake Worth.
Molina ran a red light and hit a 2013 Chevrolet Impala, killing the Euless detective and injuring his family.
He ran away from the scene, but he was caught by witnesses.
Police used a search warrant to obtain the digital video recording device and paperwork from Molina’s purchases at Fuzzy’s.
Detectives determined that Molina approached individuals at the bar with “loose, belligerent body posture,” and hugged or touched a customer who he did not appear to be acquainted with.
Richardson along with her attorney, Robert Wilson, met with Lake Worth police on Jan. 18, 2022, according to the warrant.
She recalled what drinks Molina had that day and initially said he had had six drinks, but she later admitted it was eight, according to the warrant. The bartender, however, did not know if Molina had consumed his seventh drink and she said she poured out his eighth, partially consumed drink.
Richardson told police she did not notice any indicators that Molina was intoxicated until he walked through an employees only area and that he left the restaurant shortly after that.
“He couldn’t stand up, he was behind the bar, he was in places he shouldn’t have been,” Lake Worth Police Chief J.T. Manoushagian told WFAA-TV. “The signs that he displayed should have been an indicator that he was not safe to walk away from that building. This is a stark reminder of what can happen when we ignore those signs.”
©2023 Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Visit star-telegram.com.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
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"The purpose of the CBPOA shall be to promote the cooperation and understanding of all persons involved in the enforcement of laws of the State of Texas and of the United States; the continued and convenient interchange of information and training between various Federal, State and local agencies, and to conduct ourselves in a manner that
"The purpose of the CBPOA shall be to promote the cooperation and understanding of all persons involved in the enforcement of laws of the State of Texas and of the United States; the continued and convenient interchange of information and training between various Federal, State and local agencies, and to conduct ourselves in a manner that will gain the respect of those we serve and to constantly strive to improve our position.'
The Coastal Bend Peace Officers Association is responsible for awarding thousands of dollars of scholarship money each year to qualified and responsible sons and daughters of CBPOA members who wish to carry on the tradition of law enforcement and law enforcement related fields.
Whether you help through providing meeting locations, volunteering your time, or spreading our mission through word-of-mouth, thank you. We couldn't accomplish our goals without the help of members like you.
Do you want to join the CBPOA? It's simple. Just click on the "DOWNLOAD" button below, print the file and fill it out. You can email the completed form to Charity Franco at coastalbendpoa@gmail.com
CBPOA MEMBERSHIP APPLICATION (docx)
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