Texas School District Police Chiefs Have First Conference After Uvalde

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SAN ANTONIO — In a conference room at the Marriott Riverwalk hotel, the spectacle of law enforcement vendors seemed about standard. There were the $700 bullet detection systems and high-tech camera showcases that detect when a gun is in a room and a special adhesive film that can keep a shattered window from falling apart. For $20, participants could purchase a chance to win one of three handguns.

But the law enforcement group meeting in San Antonio this week is one of the smallest in the state, and its jurisdiction is where you’ll find more pencils than criminals. In the hotel’s meeting rooms, 120 members of the Texas School District Association of Police Chiefs came to learn the latest ways to assess and manage active shooter threats and deal with mental health issues .

And they came here to San Antonio, about 95 miles east of Uvalde, just two weeks after the deadly shooting at Robb Elementary School left 19 children and two teachers dead. It’s a tough time for school district officers, as police in Texas and nationwide have criticized one of their own. In Pete Arredondo’s first in-depth interview since the May 24 shooting, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief insisted he had taken the steps he believed would best protect children. lives.

Most of the officers at the conference asked about their reactions to the Uvalde shooting and instead wanted to explain why they were in San Antonio this week. Most were devoted to an FBI presentation on active shooter training that was closed to non-police officers.

But outside of the boardrooms, leaders like Bill Avera were willing to talk about developments in school policing or their own districts.

“The biggest benefit of coming to this conference is that we meet other people who are in similar situations to us,” said Avera, 67, Jacksonville ISD police chief and chiefs group vice president. school police. “The time to exchange business cards is not in times of crisis. I need to know who my partners are, and I need to know you before something hits the fan.

Like many school police chiefs, Avera has been in law enforcement for years — for him, 46. He’s done almost everything from dispatching to becoming a detective at the Jacksonville Police Department in East Texas.

But for the past six years, Avera has served as the school district’s police chief in Jacksonville, about 20 miles south of Tyler. Both the school district and the town are about the same size as Uvalde, a fact that Avera and the other chiefs here have noticed this week.

“When you get up in the morning, you realize that…you may not be coming home,” he said.

In Texas, only 309 of its 1,200 school districts have police forces separate from their city departments.

Avera said he worked for the Jacksonville police when the school district hired its first police officer in the early 1980s. And since then, he’s seen how school district policing has changed.

“It became clear that the future of school law enforcement needed to be made up of expert, educated and educated officers who understood mental health and human development,” he said.

After Columbine, things changed. School district police have been asked to be in common areas inside schools rather than staying in their cars or offices, waiting to be called. They were also too often used as disciplinarians and issued citations, said David Kimberly, the outgoing police chief of Klein ISD. For the past 14 years or so, the focus has been on finding some sort of middle ground between officers establishing relationships with students and having to enforce school rules and local laws.

“The pendulum has swung too far,” Kimberly said of the time when officers were too often first used to discipline students. “Fast forward to the mid-2000s, he started to really go back, and [we’re] trying to find that very delicate balance.

In the department of Avera, there are only four police officers, including himself, for eight campuses.

His budget? About $500,000. That’s enough to do what he has to do, he said. But if he had an inexhaustible amount of money, he would hire enough officers to station them on every campus.

“’What would I reinforce immediately?’ he asked aloud. “It would be additional bodies, manpower.”

Avera said he had the necessary weapons to engage with an attacking gunman with an assault rifle. He just doesn’t have the officers. If he had a larger budget, he would hire armed security guards, reinforce campus buildings, and improve communications technology. One thing Avera noted is that unlike Uvalde, where police struggled to find a key to open a classroom door, he and his officers carry two keys that open virtually any door in any room. what a Jacksonville ISD building.

If the Texas legislature does something, Avera hopes it will provide more money to these small school police departments.

At Klein ISD where Kimberly works, there are over 52,700 students and 52 buildings. The police department has 60 officers and enough firepower to deal with almost any threat, he said. His department also trains other police departments and he said he is considered a model police force.

Kimberly said her department is fortunate to have a community and a school board that supports officers and allows them to try out new safety procedures. They come to the conference not only to learn from others, but also to help others with their security plans.

“I think it’s a valuable training opportunity,” he said. “Not just the training, but the opportunity to see some of the vendors, to see the technology that’s out there in one place.”

More training doesn’t seem to be a problem; since the Columbine shootings in 1999, officers have been told they must engage a shooter immediately. But every situation is different and nuanced, Avera said.

Kimberly had similar thoughts, saying there should be no finger pointing or trying to change things while investigations into what happened at Uvalde are still ongoing.

“Let’s find some good in all of this,” he said. “If there are things they’ve done really well, let’s emulate them. If there are things that need to be looked at or improved, let’s flesh them out.

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