SEPTEMBER 2020
WEATHER
17 THURSDAY
TODAY
FRIDAY
90/71
88/72
SATURDAY
88/68
LEGEND PLUMBING & ROOTER Br Lic # ML-16126 830 • 303 •3335 By o you ht T oug
Volume 55 • Number 176 830 • 379 • 2234
The Voice of Seguin Today
New group explores relationship between police, African-Americans
Seguin PD breaks down its data on stops, arrests By Darren Dunn
(Seguin) -- A group has been working behind the scenes in Seguin to begin to address the relationship between police officers and the African-American community. The group has been calling itself the Community Coalition. It’s a small group that includes some elected officials, law enforcement leaders, members of the Black Lives Matter movement, and local pastors from some historically Black churches in Seguin. The group had its first public discussion about its work, most of that discussion focused on data from the Seguin Police Department. Seguin Police Chief Terry Nichols they’ve had some difficult discussions during their meetings, and that led him and the command staff to sit down and begin to explore their operations. They took a critical look at the data to try to determine if there was a bigger story to be told. Chief Nichols says they started by looking at the overall demographics of the city of Seguin, which is roughly 53 percent Hispanic, 40 percent white, and seven percent African-American. He says they compared that to the makeup of the
department, and it showed that the Seguin PD largely reflects the diversity of the city.
“Does our department represent the community that we serve? You can see that we are very close. We have three black officers, two are detectives and one is a supervisor and 41 percent are white officers and 54 percent are Hispanic, so we have a total authorized strength of 59. We are down one right now, so we have 58 folks. So, we are pretty close to our population demographics. Civilian staff is close as well, not too far off – 22 civilian staff. We have one black civilian employee, more than half are Hispanic and 41 percent are white. So, we are pretty good as far as representing our community I believe,” said Nichols. Nichols says they then looked at the arrest data. Those numbers showed that Hispanics accounted for 64 percent of the arrest. The numbers were 13 percent for African Americans and 22 percent for whites. Nichols says those numbers led them to start to ask even more questions about their operation. See SEGUINPD, page 2
Melanie Esqueda 830-221-5688