BAILIFF'S COURT SECURITY CONFERENCE? WHERE IS IT?

By Juan Montoya

This Tuesday, when 138th District Court Bailiff Joel C. Garcia made his case for himself and two other court bailiffs to travel to Las Vegas for three days starting Oct. 21 to Oct. 24, he said the three would go there to receive mandatory legislative training in court security.

Originally, it was touted as"active shooter" training by Cameron County Asst. D.A. ,Rene Garza, who then deferred to Garcia who told the commissioners the trip was going to attend the training by the Legal Liability and Risk Management Institute, an outfit out of Indiana on court security.

Well, guess what, a cursory review of the training offered from October 21-24 have nothing to do with court security at all. Below is the itinerary listed on LLRMI's training courses in Las Vegas those three days.

Do you see court security training in any of the four training schedules above? There is homicide investigation, supervision and management, Internal Affairs, and Liability and loss Control. But no court security training that TCOLE requires.

There was one listed in the LLMRI's training schedule for court security, but it was already held, not in Las Vegas, but in Georgia. See for yourself. https://www.llrmi.com/

 Now, we understand that Dawsonville may not have scantily-clad dance-chorus girls, one-armed bandits, and that  prostitution is not legal there, so we can empathize with bailiff Garcia that Las Vegas is a much more attractive venue. Now, if only LLMRI had offered court security during their stay.

Additionally, it took Garcia emailing Jim Alsup,  LLMRI's PATC Tech and inquiring about whether the training would be for credits and whether those credits would be accepted by the Texas Commission (TCOLE) Law Enforcement.

Now, we don't know what credits for "mandatory legislative training" are required for court bailiffs, but we are willing to take a gamble  and assume that homicide investigation, supervision and management, Internal Affairs, and Liability and loss Control is not.

And even then, Alsup says that Garcia will have to have the training supervisor submit the training certificate awarded after the conference to see if TCOLE will credit the training hours. So Garcia did not know that they would get credit when he placed that on the commissioners court agenda and had to get a conformation (which the letter below is not) that the court security training credits would be accepted by TCOLE.

Good luck with that because neither Pct. 2 Constable nor the training officer at the Cameron County Sheriff's Dept. are acquainted with LLRMI and will probably deny submitting the certificates to TCOLE, simply because the courses were not offered on those days.

Did bailiffs Garcia, Leofredo Pena and Jose C. Garza deal the commissioners and the county auditor  a stacked deck - that weasel-worded approval for the "mandatory legislative training in court security" - for training that is not going to be offered during their taxpayer-funded junket to Lost Wages?

Ten to 1 they did.