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Press Releases
The Galveston County Daily News
- MOBILE EDITION -
Jailers find ways
to be more effective, safer
By Nathan Smith
The Daily News
Published February 28, 2005
Jail is not the nicest place to be.
Privacy comes at a premium. The cells are typically cold, and the food is,
to be kind, no-frills.
Though most guests stay at city jails
only for a few weeks at most, some men and women spend every day there. As
detention officers, these law enforcers see firsthand the value — and
frustration — of putting their fellow citizens behind bars.
“The people you deal with are both the
best and worst part of the job,” said Brian Berg, a detention officer with
the Texas City Police Department. “You can really help some of these people
a lot. That’s a good day. If you have a bad day, it’s going to be because
of those same people, too.”
Because knowing how to effectively
manage and accommodate their guests is so crucial in turning a bad day into
good, extensive training for these officers becomes a necessity.
More than two dozen jailers from eight
area police departments sharpened their skills at a five-day training
course sponsored by the Texas City Police Department last week.
Jason McCullough, a detention supervisor
for the Garland Police Department and a certified instructor with the
Municipal Jail Association of Texas, was one of the course’s professors.
“Basically, we’re an organization for
training jailers,” McCullough said. “We’ve been hosting these courses in
north Texas for a few years, and Texas City contacted
the board and asked us to put on a week-long session here.”
The course covered topics as diverse as
courtroom testimony, contraband control and defensive tactics, McCullough
said. The information can be crucial to the safety and development of
municipal detention officers, many of whom are younger officers who receive
mostly on-the-job training.
“There are training programs for jailers
at the county level, but nothing was really available on the city level,”
said Aaron Aguilar, another of the course’s instructors and a Garland officer. “We
tend to be able to do things on a different scale.”
City jailers typically handle a
different class of offender, as well.
“At the city level, it’s mostly just
your normal everyday citizen — traffic warrants and things like that,” said
Tracy Brown, a detention officer from the Alvin Police Department. “We have
more serious incidents, too, but you still want to treat these people like
decent citizens.”
Still, there is far more to the job than
baby-sitting. Knowing enough about gangs, for example, to see the danger in
putting rivals together in the same cell can mean the difference between
passing out lunches and passing out bandages.
“This program is very up-to-date,”
McCullough said. “We keep it updated on new gangs, new defensive techniques,
new things to watch out for. We’re behind locked doors with basically no
weapons. It can be a dangerous job, and that’s why training is so
important.”
Copyright © 2005 The Galveston County Daily News
http://galvestondailynews.com
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