A Little Compassion.

In my police career I placed my heart and soul into the work of being a law man, because I always felt that I was obeying a higher calling. I have always felt that many times it is only the efforts of one good man, or one good woman that is willing to stand up for what is right, to make the difference between peace and harmony and utter chaos brought on by the forces of evil that abound in the world.

Even though I always gravitated to the small town, rural law enforcement work, I tryed to bring professionalism to my job and always treated each case, no matter how small and insignificant with the same amount of enthusiasm as I would a major murder investigation.

In Hidalgo County a major focus of law enforcement was the interdiction of illegal narcotics being illegally transported across the border from Mexico into the U.S.

Most of the population of the county nearest the border consisted of ranchers and farmers, the very hard working salt of the earth kind who had nothing to do with the illegal importation of drugs, but were constantly having to deal with the effects of a drug war going on around them.

In our attempts to stop the flow of narcotics through our borders we were constantly trying new and unique ways to identify possible drug loads in vehicles being driven north bound on our county roads. One of these strategies was stopping vehicle for any kind of vehicle equipment infractions that we could find to use as a reason to stop a vehicle and search it for drugs. That included stopping them for not having a light that enabled one to see the license plate of a vehicle at night.

I had always objected to using the license plate light as a pretext to stop a suspicious vehilce, because I felt that it was a flimsy excuse for a stop and if I ended up finding a load of drugs in the car it would be hard to explain such a stop for such a minor violation in court. So I discouraged my deputies from using it.

One night I received a call from a local rancher who was a friend of mine, who was so upset he was crying on the phone. It seems that while and his wife were transporting a piece of machinery from one farm to another farm at around midnight, they had been stopped by one of my deputies, for not having a working license plate light on his truck.

My rancher friend went on to tell me how he had fought through Europe during WWII and served his country and had always obeyed the laws and had always paid his taxes and he gets pulled over for not having a light on his license plate and then the deputy wrote him a ticket for it. "What kind of a crazy country is this!"

It took me about an hour on the phone to calm my rancher friend down, and I told him that I would take care of the ticket. The next day I called the deputy in to talk to him. He was a promising young deputy who had just turned 21, just graduated from the state police academy and was quite sure of himself.

I explained the conversation I had with my friend the rancher to him, and told him that I would consider it a personal favor if he would dismiss the citation for the burned out license plate light. He thought about it a few seconds and told me that he would not dismiss the citation, and then quoted the law that stated that it was against the law for me to force him to drop a citation. He stood there defiantly with his jaw clamped shut, prepared to counter anything I had to say.

I did not respond to him for a few seconds, but then I explained to him that while I would not attempt to force him to drop the citation, he needed to understand that sometimes it is necessary to take other factors into consideration when enforcing the law. Such as honoring an old war hero who felt insulted by the frivolous citation he had written him when there was no lesson to be taught or serious infraction of the law with which to be dealt.

His young jaw was set like iron, and he says to me, "No sir....that man broke the law and I will not compromise, I will not drop the citation." I thanked the young deputy for coming in and complimented him on his integrity and he left my office.

I had received a few complaints from citizens that this same deputy was speeding home after his graveyard shift was done in the early morning, so at the end of his shift the next day while I was coming to work, I decided to check this complaint out myself. Sure enough I just happened to clock the young deputy on radar traveling 100 mph in a 55 mph zone traveling home when his shift was done in his county owned patrol car.

I turned on my overhead emergecy flashers, turned my vehicle around and stopped the young deputy. He was very red faced as he stood by the side of his patrol car as I wrote him a citation for speeding 100 miles an hour in a 55mile per hour zone and informed him that he was scheduled for a performance review in my office with reference to breaking department policy for speeding without using his emergency flashing lights and siren.

During his performance review a few days later, happily this deputy changed his stiff persona and had been greatly humbled. He agreed to drop the license plate light citation, and I agreed to drop the speeding citation that would have cost him several hundred dollars in fines and a possible suspension of his drivers license. I counceled him about speeding in his patrol car, and gave him a one day suspension of pay for a first offense infraction of department policy and we had a long heart to heart talk about the law and how sometimes it needs to be applied with compassion.