Not sure about this.
Mayor John Whitmire
Mayor John Whitmire wants to tap into a younger audience for police recruits, but doing so may require going to Austin and changing state law.
During a news conference introducing new Police Chief Noe Diaz, the mayor said he is in talks with lawmakers to try to see what he could do to get younger cadets for HPD as a means of addressing its officer shortage, but the trouble with that was that the current law on the books doesn’t allow those younger than 21 to carry a weapon. He said he wanted to explore ways to introduce younger candidates with proper safeguards, training and background checks.
“Let’s grab them while they’re fired up, give them a mentor and get an HPD career started younger,” the mayor said Friday, adding that the city could seek to gain officers from the local community colleges too.
In a text to the Chronicle, Whitmire clarified he wanted to lower the age to carry under “special circumstances,” particularly as a recruiting and training tool for those who want to be HPD officers before they turn 21. He said the law, if changed, would strictly apply only to police officer cadets in order to be trained as HPD officers.
“I want to bring as many qualified people to HPD as possible, and we are going to have to review policy and laws to get that done,” Whitmire said Monday. “Then I think it’s going to be done responsibly.”
Diaz stressed the need to bring people into the department who are already vested in the community.
“We need them,” Diaz said Friday. “This is our home, and who better to fill the ranks than the young people that we have in our community?”
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Greg Fremin, a retired HPD captain, was one of three 19-year-olds in his 1984 HPD class and said at the time, he couldn’t buy bullets.
Granted, Fremin already had two years in the Marine Corps under his belt and an understanding of weaponry when he was going through the academy.
If he were involved in the decision-making process, Fremin would not lower the legal age to below 19.
“I would say that as long as these young men and women that are applying are mature and they have great life experiences, let them do it,” Fremin said, adding that HPD needed to be very careful with its vetting and screening processes if the law were to change.
But if a background check fails and a younger person who shouldn’t have a weapon is armed, Fremin said “it could be a worst-case scenario.”
Fremin, who used to be captain over HPD’s police academy, stood by the department’s vetting process and said they used to go through hundreds of applicants before getting to the 70 to fill a cadet class. Those vetting processes don’t always prevent slipups, though, even after doing everything you could.
There’s risk with hiring younger officers with maturity, but that maturity will also depend on the person, Fremin said.
“You’ve got young men and women that are still maturing their thought processes, their critical decision-making skills, their rationale, you know their ability to communicate effectively,” Fremin said. “I mean, all these things you get better with in time from a maturity standpoint.”
State law already allows for the younger police recruits. HPD’s own rules limit recruits to being at least 20.5 years old; Mayor Whitmire says that would need to wait for the law about carrying guns to be changed before it would be revised. I don’t object to the narrowly-tailored law change, especially given that the restriction on under-21-year-olds having handguns was halted by a federal court and is not currently being enforced by DPS. I do share the concerns expressed by former Captain Fremin. We know that people’s brains are still maturing at that age, and police officers are asked to make a lot of judgment calls as part of their job, with potentially deadly consequences. I would suggest that HPD look at other avenues for recruitment before pursuing this one.
This is minor and feels like wanting to appear to be doing something.