Colleyville, Texas September 11, 2017
Letter to Editor: (name withheld by LNO Editor)
I was pulled over on Hall-Johnson on Thursday afternoon, for going 40 in a 30 m.p.h. zone.
Drat! I explained to the officer I was guilty, I was hurrying as it takes 15 minutes somedays to get out of my neighborhood that is surrounded by construction on Glade and Hwy 26, and I was on my way to pick up 3 young children from XXXXXXXXXX Elementary. I asked for his mercy; i.e. a warning.
He said, let me check your license and registration and if it’s all okay, I’ll just issue a warning. He went to his vehicle.
I was curious that he said he would ‘issue’ a warning. He came back and handed me his little electronic device and asked me to sign my name. I asked what I was signing and he said a warning.
I said thank you for the warning, but I’ve never SIGNED a warning before. He said this is a documented warning, and the policy is to sign it. Please sign here. I said I never heard of that ‘policy’ and asked if I HAD to sign? He said, no he could mark REFUSED on it.
And then he kind of laughed and said, and we also take photos of drivers now, and held up the device to my face, similar to taking a photo with a cell phone. I said, What? And I held my hand up in front of my face. I said I’ve never heard of that before either. He said its the policy.
What the hell? Traffic laws are now interwoven with new ‘policies’?
LNO Requested a response from Assistant Colleyville Police Chief Robert Hinton, his response is below;
“Senate Bill 1849 commonly known as the Sandra Bland Act requires all police departments to document all traffic stops even if no citation is issued. This law change which went into effect September 1,2017 requires that all warnings also be captured for racial profiling statistics thus it is now policy that all warnings must be entered into the system and issued to the violator. This tracking is now mandatory on all traffic stops. There are many other aspects of the new law that place additional burdens on police agencies.
Information on the Law is below; although there was no provision LNO could find directly stated in the Bill concerning “requires all warnings also be captured for racial profiling,” although there is certainly no question concerning the validity of Assistant Chief of Police Robert Hinton’s comment.
Below is a brief summary of the bill:
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday signed into law a measure that seeks to address the circumstances that led to the death of Sandra Bland, a black woman found dead in a county jail days after being arrested during a routine traffic stop.
The Sandra Bland Act mandates county jails divert people with mental health and substance abuse issues toward treatment, makes it easier for defendants to receive a personal bond if they have a mental illness or intellectual disability, and requires that independent law enforcement agencies investigate jail deaths. The law takes effect Sept. 1.
The law’s namesake, a 28-year-old from Illinois, died in the Waller County Jail in 2015. Her arrest followed a lengthy argument between Bland and then-Department of Public Safety Trooper Brian Encinia, which was documented by the officer’s dashboard camera.
fter Bland’s death – which was ruled a suicide – her family, activists and lawmakers swiftly criticized the rural jail’s leadership and Encinia. With a new legislative session a long way away, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards was first to offer a solution, revising the intake screening process of county jail inmates to better identify mental health issues. During the legislative session, state Rep. Garnet Coleman of Houston introduced a bill named in honor of Bland. A comprehensive piece of legislation, the bill originally tackled racial profiling during traffic stops, consent searches and counseling for police officers who profiled drivers, in addition to jail reforms.
That bill didn’t move out of committee because of opposition from law enforcement groups and lawmakers concerned about unfunded mandates. The Senate version of the bill, by state Sen. John Whitmire of Houston, removed much of the language related to encounters with law enforcement (de-escalation training remained) and became a mostly mental health bill, which ultimately passed both chambers without opposition.
Bland’s family expressed disappointment in the Senate version of the bill, calling it a missed opportunity because it removed language relevant to Bland’s stop.
The bill Abbott signed Thursday increases public safety, Coleman said in a statement.
“The Sandra Bland Act will prevent traffic stops from escalating by ensuring that all law enforcement officers receive de-escalation training for all situations as part of their basic training and continuing education,” he said.
3 Comments
Walt Mills
Reading the Senate Bill 1849, I see no requirement for a photo. Specifically, it requires the collection of racial data based on the description given by the suspect and lacking that response, the best description given by the officer. Further, the bill states explicitly that the warning may be verbal only. There is a provision for local policy of implementation, but only to the end point of collecting the data as described above. I am not a lawyer, but the law seems clear in its intention: prevention of retinal profiling ha a department or individual officer AND protection for mentally ill sy=uspects. Furthermore, the law prohibits arrest and detention for a speeding or traffic violation, unless another crime-unrelated to the initial stop-is discovered.
Walt Mills
Sentence correction: prevention of racial profiling by a department or individual officer.
Chris Kinsey
In this era of fake, incomplete, deliberately inflamatory and occasionally flat out false news I occasionally like to fact check. The potential for digital overreach on the part of our police department caught my attention. However:
In Section 5.01 of the bill as enrolled it clearly states:
(6) require collection of information relating to motor vehicle stops in which a ticket, citation, or warning is issued and to arrests made as a result of those stops, including information relating to:
(A) the race or ethnicity of the individual detained;
(B) whether a search was conducted and, if so, whether the individual detained consented to the search; [and]
(C) whether the peace officer knew the race or ethnicity of the individual detained before detaining that individual;
(D) whether the peace officer used physical force that resulted in bodily injury, as that term is defined by Section 1.07, Penal Code, during the stop;
(E) the location of the stop; and
(F) the reason for the stop; and
(7) require the chief administrator of the agency, regardless of whether the administrator is elected, employed, or appointed, to submit an annual report of the information collected under Subdivision (6) to:
(A) the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement; and
(B) the governing body of each county or municipality served by the agency, if the agency is an agency of a county, municipality, or other political subdivision of the state.
Kudos to the Colleyville Police Department for recognizing that with the simple snap of a cell phone with GPS enabled (6) (A)(C) and (E) are admissibly documented with little effort on the part of the officer. The documentation of the warning also fulfills the other requirements of the bill. No doubt a year from now we will be reading articles about the disproportionate number of Martians receiving warnings vs. Venutians but that will be next year’s story.
Did the whining, complaining, SPEEDING resident endangering other people’s kids as she raced to pick up her own not realize that there was probably also a body cam and definitely a dash cam on her? Does she not realize that her picture is (potentially) taken at every intersection with a traffic light camera mounted above the stop lights? Yes, they control the lights but they are cameras and they are picture and video capable. Holding up her hand to prevent a picture indeed! How about strapping a watch to that hand and leaving 15 minutes early since she admitted she knows that it sometimes takes 15 minutes to get out. Exaggerate much do we? 15 minutes. 900 seconds. Officer Friendly showed great courtesy in not writing her up for gross hyperbole.
If an officer wants to let me off with a warning he or she can take my picture and I will happily autograph it for them.
Admittedly a racial profiling rider on a mental illness detention bill is a surprise but when you say you didn’t see it in the bill I suspect you mean you didn’t see it in the summary. It’s clearly in the bill for anyone to read.
The confusion caused in the traffic stop was clearly the motorist’s, not the Colleyville Police Department. The article gently implies overreach on the part of the CPD. In reality, the article documents under research on the part of the editor and requires a clarification. CPD right. Resident wrong. Editor uninformed.