Turn the heat up on criminals “as much as I can"

McNamara – Cawthon strategy two-pronged

West – To serve as a working Sheriff of McLennan County, a lawman first and an administrator second, Parnell McNamara has a two-pronged approach.

“I want to turn the heat up on the criminals as much as I can,” he says.

Here is how he and his sidekick intend to do the job.

First, drugs are the single most potent, acknowledged source of crime in any cop's book.

Either the victims of the drug trade's predatory nature of addiction - and the subsequent loss of moral fiber that always results - are selling dope, stealing to get more of it, or they're out of their minds due to its influence and mistreating their fellow humans as a result.

But there is a problem. There is nowhere for the average citizen to turn when it comes to fighting back against the kind of abuse the world of drugs thrusts upon them.

People who have to put up with all that misery seem to be on their own in a world populated with cops too busy to hear out their complaints.

The McLennan County Sheriff's Department eliminated the multi-agency drug task force some time during the first term of the Larry Lynch administration.

Parnell McNamara has a remedy for that, he told friends and supporters at a get together held at the Czech Inn in this community Sunday afternoon.

By reviving the Drug Task Force, an agency staffed by officers seconded from police agencies throughout the county, he intends to give his fellow citizens a friendly ear when it comes to doing something about the miserable conditions caused by drug use.

He recalled a case where a woman contacted him and he took her to see the narcotics officers of the now defunct drug task force. They arranged to have her persuade a certain drug dealer in a Waco suburb to sell her some cocaine.

“He wound up doing time in the penitentiary for that,” Marshal McNamara recalls.
His sidekick, a retired Texas Ranger who now works as an agent of the Texas Department of Corrections, Institutional Division, is seconded to the U.S. Marshal's Service Fugitive Warrants Division.

He says there is a decided lack of cooperation from the Warrants Division of the McLennan County Sheriff's Office.

For instance, Matt Cawthon recalled during an interview following Marshall McNamara's campaign presentation, when investigators of the District Attorney's office were looking for about a dozen persons who had been indicted for Lone Star Card fraud, they learned that the post-indictment capias warrants were most definitely on file.

How about those arrest warrants, they asked the warrants division of the sheriff's office?

Oh, they had them. They were on file, just waiting to be served on an inter alia, unaided basis by police officers making their usual rounds who may have detained a man or woman on some matter, then learned the suspect is wanted under an indictment, sealed or otherwise.

The warramts were safe and secure in a filing cabinet, neatly logged in on a computer system, but they were as yet unserved.

That wasn't what they people from the DA's office were wanting. They wanted the deputies to actually get out there and serve the arrest warrants.

They were refused. The people in the warrants division turned them down.

Why?

He says the answer was simple enough.

Top-ranking officials of the Sheriff's Office claim they just don't have the resources to go out and serve every warrant.

Getting at the information as to exactly how many such warrants are languishing in the files is difficult.

Open records requests cannot be couched in the terms of an interrogatory. They must be specific as to what is requested, and not of a general nature, such as, “How many capias warrants do you have for Lone Star Card abuse?” or, even better, “How many outstanding capias warrants do you have on file?”

Ranger Cawthon estimates there are from 600 to 700 such warrants awaiting service.

To remedy that situation, all one needs to do is to staff an aggressive and proactive warrants division, and then let the deputies on that flying squad serve the arrest warrants as they are issued, according to Ranger Cawthon.