What made this meeting so short is the lack of public presentations. Mayor Hughson implied that the next meeting may be grueling, though.
First up, Citizen Comment:
- Richard Amaya slams SMPD. Biden Bus, Ryan Hartman, other issues that have come up. (The very next day, actually, it was announced that Ryan Hartmann has been terminated. Activism making a difference.)
- Darlene Starr speaks about the Animal Shelter and how dismally it’s being run, and how admin is driving away volunteers. This is the latest in a steady stream of speakers painting a totally dysfunctional picture of the Animal Shelter. It sounds demoralizing. I gather that we’re finally trying to hire a director, although the position has been vacant for over a year.
Non-consent Agenda
- they tweaked the homestead exemption for disabled people and people 65 and over.
- They created the Animal Services Committee, with Mayor Hughson, Shane Scott, and Alyssa Garza joining whichever community members are on it.
- Packet meetings have a Do Not Resuscitate order placed on them. (No one but me can possibly be following this deathly dull story line.)
And then: Body Cameras. This was brought by Alyssa Garza, asking about the city policy around body cameras. Namely, what is it?
First, Chief Dandridge says there are state laws governing release of footage, and that SMPD follows those policies. It wasn’t clear to me if San Marcos has other, additional policies, or if the state code is the sum total.
Next, Chief Dandridge makes his main point: Police bodycam footage can’t be automatically released because it would taint all legal proceedings. It would make it very hard to seat a grand jury to get an indictment. To me, this didn’t land as quite as big a bombshell as he seemed to think it would land, because I immediately wanted to know, “Okay fine. What about after the trial is over?”
Dandridge answers that all footage is available, under FOIA, after all adjudication has ended. Fair enough.
Apparently Texas Municipal League is a resource everyone respects. Commissioner Garza has gone and found best practices for body camera footage release according to TML. She begins to go through it with Chief Dandridge, and then suggests that he just send the SMPD body camera footage policy over to council and she can read it for herself.
(Why couldn’t the policy have been included in the packet? Your guess is as good as mine.)
So that’s about where it wrapped up. Everyone professed themselves a little more informed and enlightened on body camera footage release policies. I’m interested to see if anything comes of the review of the official policy.
Post-Script: In Q&A from the press and public, LMC asked if the public has access to the body camera footage policy. Chief Dandridge says that it’s not up on their website, but that it can be FOIA’d.