El Paso Police Reveal Internal Affairs Investigation Findings

The El Paso Police Department has placed another officer on paid administrative leave in the wake of an internal affairs investigation auditing the department?s handling of federal grant money.

That brings the total number of police officers affected by the several-month long investigation to 17. Fourteen officers have resigned or retired, two officers have been placed on administrative leave, while one officer has been placed on administrative duty.

?I?m glad this is finally over, and I?m disappointed in the outcome,? said Police Chief Greg Allen before a crowd of reporters early Friday morning. ?This investigation, if nothing else, has pointed out some failure on the department in providing training with these grants.?

The internal investigation began in August, and according to El Paso Police Department internal affairs investigator Sgt. Chris Mears, is coming to a close. Police spokesman Darrel Petry said the investigation was spurred by mismanagement of funds uncovered in Fort Worth. That caused the U.S. Department of Transportation to look closely at the five largest beneficiaries of federal grant money within the state, which includes the city of El Paso. As a result, 20 police officers were red-flagged.

Members of the El Paso Police Department decided not only to investigate the 20 police officers, but all 183 officers who performed police work under federal grants during the fiscal years of 2009 and 2010. It led to the resignation of Scot McFarland, Jose Ruiz, Ana Reza, Michael Arzaga, Kenny Huynh, Luis Ortiz, Luis Acosta, Jorge Arrellano, David Jiminez, Francisco Chavez, Charles Romo, Gabriel Castandeda and Oscar Candelaria. Enrique Davila was the lone officer to retire.

?No one up to this point has let the discipline process go through its course,? said Mears. ?We do have one case that it may go down that road. We?re not sure yet.?

While the names of the officers who decided to leave the department have caught many people?s attention, investigators said their assessment dug much deeper. They learned that six of the 10 program managers who oversaw grants had not attended monitor training. They also realized that reimbursement, in some cases, were being addressed too slowly, resulting in issues with receiving the funding the department qualified for.

Overall, the El Paso Police Department implemented a grading system of all 37 grants that were currently active. The results unveiled that 32 grants were considered ?good? grades, three were ?very good,? and three more were graded ?poor.? A grade was not given for the Selective Traffic Enforcement Program (STEP) grant that led to numerous resignations and officers being put on leave.

As a remedy for the problems, the El Paso Police Department is set to hire a grant administrator who will oversee all grants obtained by the department. That employee will help oversee the training of officers; however, Allen said moving forward he would like to see his officers further removed from the process.

?My feeling on it is to take officers out of the equation dealing directly with grants, and making that a provision that has to be handled simply by professionals that have expertise in those particular fields,? said Allen.

Moving forward the department will do quarterly reports on every grant that is currently active through the department.

Still, concern remains that this problem wasn?t uncovered until it had gotten this far.

?As the department head, that falls on my shoulders,? said Allen. ?I?m not making excuses for it; we didn?t know there was a fire that needed to be looked at.?

Allen declined to comment on whether higher-ranking officers would be disciplined for the lack of checks and balances within the grant process, but said it would remain a possibility.

Currently, the El Paso Police Department cannot receive grants through the Texas Department of Transportation because of the pending investigation into one of the many grants that were audited during the separate internal affairs investigation. A member of the TXDOT was contacted for comment, but has yet to respond.