Its' becoming obvious to media types and news organizations that the policy of the Brownsville Police Department and the City of Brownsville administration is to keep the lid on any news potentially embarrassing to the city and law enforcement from the public.
Whether it's withholding the video of the teen who was gunned down at Cumming Middle School while brandishing a pellet gun, the report of the two cops who did indeed get involved in a brawl over a falda, that a Brownsville cop's house was raided due to his alleged involvement with the Gulf Cartel, or that the name of the city health inspector who gunned down two people at a local night club was Willie Gonzalez, absolutely none of this would have been divulged if they had their druthers.
Chief Orlando Rodriguez and City Manager Charlie Cabler have made it plain that the less the public knows about these incidents, the better. Unfortunately, there are so many cracks in this dike that they may soon find they're running out of fingers.
(They're not much different in the City of Brownsville than they are in Cameron County where the misdeeds of Pct. 2 Commissioner Ernie Hernandez and Aurora De la Garza are common knowledge. What has been exposed during the Abel Limas debacle is but the tip of an iceberg of Titanic proportions.)
But even though the local daily touts the fact that its coverage area includes ome 200,000, Brownsville still retains some little-town characteristics, notably one: that everyone knows what everyone is up to.That's why when we posted a story about the brawl involving officer Everardo Longoria and another brother officer, commenters to this blog fleshed out the incident with the names of the participants and some other sordid details that we would rather not repeat.
The fact is that people in the community know what happened despite the adminstrations's efforts to squelch the truth. When higher-ups engage in efforts to suppress the news, they not only lose credibility, but expose themselves to ridicule and the questioning of their motives.
Take for example the blackout of the incident at the Toucan Lounge involving city health inspector Willie Gonzalez where he sought a confrontation with a man and woman (a girlfriend?) and then shot them outside when they reacted to his aggressions. So far, even though everyone knows who he was, neither the PD nor the city administration have confirmed his involvement. All we know is that he was put on suspension with pay, probably until the heat dies down and his lawyers reach an agreement with those of the victims. Hasta que se llegue a un arreglo.
Lydia Gonzalez, his mother, and longtime city secretary, apparently was owed enough favors from the City Hall crowd that she cashed in her chips to cover for her boy.
We know, for example, (this is a little town) that the man he shot in the parking lot of Toucan Lounge at closing time remains hospitalized as of Wednesday and that he runs the risk of permanent paralysis because the bullet that Gonzalez fired from the handgun he was carrying in his glove box struck his spine after it perforated his belly.
We also know that the victim has already engaged the services of an attorney, so sooner or later the lawsuit will lay bare the truth and the whole world will know what the cops and Cabler have trying to keep from us.
And in the case of the cops brawling, the fact that Longoria is the bother of a city commissioner (Ricardo), apparently also comes into play since more than one independent source has confirmed that the incident did take place and that it was a fight por faldas (over a woman).
In the case of Jaime Gonzalez, the 15-year-old who was killed at Cummings (also, coincidentally, by Longoria), both the police department and now the Cameron County District Attorney's Office, are fighting its release. There are different versions of what happened there, and some of it is not very flattering of the law enforcement types involved.
In some accounts, it is said that the cops shot out the glass doors of the school to get a clear view of what was going on in the hallways and that the officers involved mistook that for the teen firing at them and opened up on him. Publicly, the story is that Gonzalez was either pointing the gun at the cops or threatening a student standing in a corner of the hallway. Which one is it? What is the truth?
As we said when we reported on the raid on a local police officers' home because of his suspected involvement with the Gulf Cartel; we have his name and his badge number. If we have it, you can rest assured that other people in town also know it. And yet, the powers that be continue to hold their fingers on the dike of information that has already seeped in and spread across town. The local daily is no better. When a police commander (since retired, conveniently) was caught using his city-issued cell phone to send nude pictures of himself to a girlfriend from inside the PD, we posted the photos on this blog. So did other media, who, like us, covered his privates. The Herald, pushed at last to cover the story, chose not to publish a photo.
Instead, on the following day, they published a full front-face photo of a male transvestite arrested for soliciting sex for money in downtown Brownsville as a sort of redemption for not embarrassing the former commander, who in a way was also dong the same thing except that he was using public resources and was on the public payroll at the time.
As we said before. We're still a little town in many respects. News travels fast. We know. Porque nos seguimos haciendo?
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