Texas officers accused of violence, other crimes avoid prison in deals with prosecutorsAcross Texas, hundreds of law enforcement officers have permanently surrendered their peace officer license in the past four years. A KXAN investigation of 297 of those surrenders has discovered nearly all the officers were accused or charged with a crime – most often felonies. And, in almost every case the officers used their license as a bargaining tool by agreeing to surrender it as part of a deal to avoid jail or prison.
KXAN reviewed 297 permanent surrender cases in Texas from 2015 through mid-2018. In nearly every case, the peace officers were accused of or charged with a crime. At least half of the cases were felonies.
Peace officer licenses are issued and maintained by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE). All law enforcement officers at the municipal, county and state level, except for state corrections officers, must be licensed.
In at least 245 instances, peace officers used their licenses to leverage a lesser sentence in a plea bargain. More than 30 officers surrendered their licenses in lieu of prosecution or to halt an investigation.
KXAN uncovered the system of deals by analyzing records obtained from more than 100 public information act requests filed at all levels of state and local governments, including TCOLE, county and district courts, as well as local, county and state law enforcement agencies.
Officers who agreed to surrender their licenses received little or no jail time for offenses including sexual assault of children and women in custody, taking bribes and dealing narcotics to prisoners, lying about the circumstances of a police shooting and destroying evidence in criminal cases.
In some instances, the accused police officers already had histories of misconduct yet were able to trade their badges in a plea bargain and walk away with deferred adjudication and probation.KXAN found more than two dozen cases in the last four years in which police officers or jailers permanently surrendered their licenses to avoid prosecution or to end investigations into possible misconduct.
The only indication KXAN could find of possible misconduct in many of these cases was noted in a portion of the file TCOLE maintains for each delicensed officer titled “summary of the reason for permanent surrender.” It’s a sheet each officer is supposed to provide, but that does not always happen.
It is unclear what level of punishments those officers may have faced. It is also more difficult, if not impossible, to obtain records of police misconduct when charges are not filed against the officer.
In Texas, state law limits TCOLE’s authority to permanently revoke an officer’s license, unless he or she has been convicted of a felony or certain misdemeanors. If district attorneys want to get a bad police officer out of law enforcement, in most cases they either have to go to trial or make a deal, said Roger Goldman, professor emeritus at Saint Louis University School of Law.
Texas’ license decertification laws are pushing district attorneys to make these plea bargains, according to Goldman.
Texas has the most licensed peace officers of any state, yet Florida and Georgia decertify far more officers per year than Texas does. Those states have broader authority to revoke the license, Goldman said.
https://www.kxan.com/bargaining-the-badge/Just some of the cases and the
punishment gift these scumbags received. Sexual assault of a child and not a single day in prison:
A City of Wharton police officer was charged with three counts of sexual assault of a child in 2016. In a negotiated deal that included the permanent surrender of his peace officer license, he pleaded guilty to one count and received 10 years’ probation. His punishment also included fines, sex offender registration and community service, according to court records.
A law enforcement officer in the Fort Bend County District Attorney’s Office was charged with four counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child, all first-degree felonies, in 2012. He pleaded guilty to one count of injury to a child and received 10 years of probation, no prison time, and was required to permanently surrender his peace officer license.