ustxtxb_obs_1981_05_29_50_00008-00000_000.pdf

eotapes of police beatings surfaced during a court suit. Videotapes made over a seven-year period which graphically showed police beating prisoners at the booking desk were the main issue in the stiff mayoral election battle between Brand and Dr. Ramiro Casso. The tapes were shown on national TV and made headlines nationwide. Brand asked that the Senate subcommittee delay hearings on his nomination until after the election. When the subcommittee declined, Brand withdrew his name. Casso came within. 900 votes of winning the election. Uribe said Brand’s narrow victory was in no way a vindication of the city administration. But Clements resubmitted the nomination. The League of United Latin American Citizens passed a resolution in its recent state convention urging the nomination be rejected. ACLU lawyer Jim Harrington, who has represented 26 plaintiffs in brutality suits, said, “No matter how favorably end up with a case of mismanagement” in the face of what Harrington called “pervasive” police brutality. He said while 72 tapes still exist, another 70 have been erased. Harrington had been trying to get his harids on the tapes for use in the lawsuits since 1975. City officials stonewalled, denying they existed. But in March 1980, city manager Calvin Gibson was asked about the tapes in federal court and admitted the city had them. The scene for the Brand hearings in the Senate chamber was almost theatrical, the committee assembled, at the outset the upright, white-maned Mayor Brand facing them from the end of the table in the aisle of the Senate Floor, eight television cameras on tripods flanking the group on both sides of the table and other hand-held cameras aimed at them from amid the crowd. Brand’s witnesses in his behalf from McAllen lined up on chairs inside the Senate rail. It might have been a hearing in Joe McCarthy’s time or the time of Watergate. Brand’s presentation in his opening defense was smooth and affirmative. He was in the right; he had done all that he should; the items he, had been challenged on had entirely plausible explanations. From his introduction to the committee by Uribe, one gathered Brand is a hard-driving, driven man, an achievements-collector from his time with the Marines, his business success, his roles in McAllen as member of the school board, city and then county commissioner, then mayor. He is 8 MAY 29, 1981 chairman of the board of the General Douglas MacArthur Academy of Freedom at Howard Payne University, a member of the Texas War on Drugs Committee, an active deacon at Calvary Baptist Church in McAllen. Brand characterized himself as a public servant putting in 40 hours a week at a $50-a-month mayor’s job because be loves civic work. A string of ministers and private citizens from McAllen, both Mexican-American and Anglo, backed up the image of Brand as a sincerely dedicated man who has spent many hours and thousands of dollars working with troubled youth and in social service projects. Uribe himself said that newspaper articles indicating Brand is in any way a racist or a bigot are “terribly unfair and unkind.” “I abhor police brutality as much as any of you do,” Brand said. “The first knowledge.” In a case of police brutality and the policemen involved lying under oath, he insisted on suspension, but the police chief resisted him on that, so McAllen got a new police chief. As soon as he found out about the tapes of police brutality at the booking desk, Brand said, he went to the FBI. He denied he had known previously about widespread police brutality in McAllen he had regarded the ACLU suits, he said, as simply “harassment.” Now, he says, the c-shift on which much brutality occurred has been broken up; “most of the officers involved left of their own accord,” though some still “must be disciplined.” “We have eliminated the major abuse.” Harrington denied officers found guilty of violating prisoners’ civil rights have been fired by the city. He said persons involved in some of the alleged incidents were still working for the police department. Brand conceded two policemen still . on the force should be fired and others disciplined. Noticing that Brand had turned to the police department to reform itself, Sen. Betty Andujar, Fort Worth, asked, “You don’t have any external review?” The mayor replied, “The police department very jealously guarded its review process.” Brand also told the subcommittee that he did not look into allegations of police brutality because police department officials never sent him formal complaints. “I don’t believe you can fmd anything I didn’t look into, when I received civilian complaints,” he told the committee. Sen. Bill Meier of Euless asked Harrington whether he had any direct evidence that Brand had known about and failed to disclose the tapes. Harrington said he did not. Police Capt. Jim Bormann has testified in federal court that the mayor at one time issued orders to destroy the tapes, which Brand denies. Brand told the Senate subcommittee that he had ordered the destruction of audio tapes which the police department had been making of conversations between prisoners and their attorneys without their knowledge. Brand said that when he found out about the recordings, he ordered that they be destroyed because they violated prisoners’ rights; the order was clearly marked to indicate it meant telephone tapes only; and he did not realize that a federal court order that audio and video recordings be preserved applied to the telephone tapes. He would not knowingly have violated the court order, he told the senators. Uribe said he felt the action was a clear violation of the court order. McAllen police had taped all incoming calls, Brand said, “whether the chief talked to his wife, whether a prisoner talked to his lawyer . . . ” This was general practice until about two years ago, when a pay phone was put in and prisoners were let talk to their lawyers on it. Did people know, asked Sen. Peyton McKnight, Tyler, that when they phoned the police giving information that might be dangerous to the callers, they were being taped? No, Brand replied, because he didn’t know his own calls to the police department were taped “for six years.” McKnight, chairman of the Senate subcommittee, said he has known Brand as a man of “honesty and integrity” for years. But McKnight said he was concerned about continuing investigations into allegations that Brand may have known of the brutality incidents and any possibility that Brand himself might sue persons who have raised the allegations against him. McKnight asked whether Brand shared concern that “this might be a detriment to serving on the prison board” especially at a time when the Department of Corrections, which the ninemember body oversees, is under the federal gun to make substantial prison reforms. Brand said working on the board now represents a “tremendous challenge” and that “I think I would serve as well on that board as anyone else.” Brand said his work with the educational system and young people in the McAllen area has given him knowledge about basic problems in society related to the prison system. Mrs. Otilia Dennett, mother of a 15year-old boy allegedly beaten by the McAllen police, testified in favor of Brand. “I’m not so proud of what they ” +WA. iwtr, kf 4. 001,4,0401111101PWntsp*A71.Ar.