San Juan police chief discounts union survey

San Juan Police Chief Ruben Morin may soon be fighting to save his job, if indeed the city commission decides that complaints from inside the cop shop are worthy of his dismissal.

“I hope not,” Morin said during a Tuesday interview. “I have a lot of things I’d still like to do for this city, this department.”

The police chief’s name was on last week’s city agenda, but no action was taken. A meeting was scheduled for noon Monday so the city commission could review his work but had to be postponed due to scheduling conflicts. Morin’s name should appear, though, on next week’s city commission agenda.

Based on chismé floating through San Juan coffee shops, a majority of police officers under Morin’s command are unhappy with the chief’s performance for a variety of reasons. At the center of this is a job-performance survey that the Texas Municipal Police Union conducted among San Juan’s rank and file, which includes the majority of sworn officers. The survey, however, wasn’t done solely in-house, because apparently a field union rep from outside the department interviewed officers while they were off the clock, so to speak.

Mayor Mario Garza said Monday that he was aware of the survey but had yet to review it but obviously has plans to do so before next week’s commission meeting.

“I don’t know what questions were asked, but after speaking with the city manager, in a nutshell, it’s not favorable for the chief.”

Although efforts made earlier this week to speak with the union rep proved fruitless, here is what is allegedly contained in the survey, although we won’t know for sure until the survey results become public documents:

• Despite having 18 police officer positions open, the chief has only hired one applicant during the past 12 months.

• Because of these job vacancies, some work shifts — cops on the beat — are terribly understaffed, leading in part to low morale in the ranks.

• Of the 22 voluntary surveys conducted, none spoke highly of the chief.

• It’s not that San Juan lacks applicants for the open positions, but rather, for whatever reason (the applicant smoked a joint back in high school, or he has a tattoo), the chief won’t hire them.

• The argument can’t be made anymore that San Juan pays its officers less than cities of equal population. The pay has increased, so the applicants are there for the waiting.

• Thanks to his 23 years with Texas DPS, the chief is trying to turn the municipal department into a mirror image of the state agency, including dress and unit decals.

What other issues the survey might have addressed isn’t yet known, but Chief Morin said Tuesday that anytime a new chief comes in and wants to change things around, there is almost always going to be pushback of some sort.

“When I came in, I changed the department’s expectations and implemented higher standards. Some people had become complacent, and they didn’t like change,” Morin said.

To prove that obviously not everyone is unhappy with his job as chief, Morin points to at least four senior officers who have decades of experience with the department, and were obviously on the job long before he appeared. Approximately four have more than 25 years with the department, he said.

“I value those officers a lot,” he said, “as I do with the entire department, which is why I am trying to implement a new command structure that will open up more promotions inside the department. As it now stands, the command structure in place dates back to the 1990s.”

Police Pay & Expectations

Actually, Ruben Morin and the San Juan PD go way back…all the way back to the early 1990s when he was fresh out of the police academy looking for a job.

“I was blessed to come and work for the city. I was young and eager to get a job as a police officer.”

Former longtime City Manager Jorge Arcaute was police chief at the time.

“He showed me a lot about responsibility, accountability, integrity, the meaning of all of those things.”

After almost five years on duty, Morin left San Juan in 1997 and headed to the Texas DPS. Twenty- three years later, having obtained the rank of lieutenant, mainly working in and around San Antonio, Morin retired from the state agency and came back to San Juan, where he was appointed chief Dec. 16, 2020.

“One of my life goals was to come back to San Juan as the chief of police. It’s a dream that fortunately came true.”

With regard to the department’s pay structure, Morin said he has been trying to lobby for more pay, but since the city is stuck with collective bargaining, he can only sit on the sidelines basically and watch, since civil service offers him little to no leverage in the collective bargaining process.

“What’s interesting, though,” he said, “is that my proposed strategic plan has a better pay scale attached to it than the one submitted by the (union).”

Meaning, the same union that helped officers fill out the surveys, which reportedly gave Morin a failing grade.

“When we want to compare San Juan’s salaries with other departments of relatively equal size, we look at Weslaco and San Benito,” Morin said during a previous interview recorded last February. “I just recently saw a Weslaco posting, where the starting pay was $48,000. Our starting pay is $39,000. We’re paying almost $8,000 less than San Benito.”

Morin said that when he came on the job in December 2020, there were already eight openings.

“And of course I hired two, and as soon as I hired two, two more left. There were a total of nine officers who left in 2021.”

Morin said that the problem finding enough officers to fill the ranks of those recently departed dates back prior to his arrival in December 2020. “Under the previous chief, San Juan lost 21 officers in 2019, and between 12 and 15 in 2020. What I’d like to do is structure this department so that we won’t lose good officers to either bigger agencies, or to state or federal agencies, because the pay is more. We should have incentives in place so that they stay here for their entire career.”

The good news, though, according to the chief is that the San Juan PD has hired six additional officers over the past two weeks and has six more waiting in the wings.

“The six additional hires have passed everything but the polygraph because the polygraph examiner has been tied up. But within the next week, all told, we should have 12 new officers working in the department.”

Another complaint made against Molina has been his alleged pickiness with regard to possible new-hires. Let’s say a good-looking (grades and performance) police prospect admits during the polygraph exam that he or she smoked a joint back in high school. The slam against Morin is that he will immediately dismiss that individual and not hire him or her.

“No, that’s not true,” said Morin. “The ones being turned away are typically due to a more serious matter. It’s not because they smoked a joint when they were young as unfortunate as that is. Still, what I’m trying to do is make sure that the city gets the best police recruits it can, because in my opinion, that’s what our citizens deserve.”

Asked what he’ll do if the city commission doesn’t support him, Morin said he hopes that doesn’t prove to be the case.

“Obviously, I love this job, and I know there are still a lot of changes I’d like to make.”

But what about these union surveys out there that apparently aren’t giving him high marks with regard to leadership skills, job performance?

“It’s like I said before, when you come in and make changes, some people who have become complacent aren’t going to like it. If I say I expect more from the officers, some aren’t going to like that. If I want to implement higher standards, some officers aren’t going to like that. But in the end, every new thing I’ve tried to implement has been for the betterment of this community and its citizens.”