HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR INTERVIEW WITH CHARLEY WILKINSON
Q: Lone Star Standard
How was CLEAT started and what does CLEAT do?
A: Charley Wilkinson
In the 1970s, young officers returning from Vietnam, particularly the police officers and deputy sheriffs, formed their own association in Texas because many of them couldn't get a lawyer to enforce the statutes that would keep them from being fired, demoted or disciplined unfairly across the state. It took some time, but ultimately they came together at the El Tropicana Hotel in San Antonio and formed into a new union.
CLEAT didn’t affiliate itself with the Texas AFL-CIO, and they disassociated with the Texas Municipal Police Association. So, this was a whole new deal. And 47 years later, CLEAT has an $11 million budget, 27,000 plus membership, roughly 117 local affiliate unions across the state, and we represent officers in over 800 agencies across the state of Texas.
The primary goal is to make sure that when an officer calls us and they have an issue, whether it is a critical incident which we respond to in the field in real time to every shooting and every-in custody death, we are there within 2 hours with a staff attorney. The officer gets a real lawyer on the ground. So, we’re there to protect their interests and make sure that they’re answering questions that will protect their job.
We do so much more as well. In some municipal and county groups we are the dental provider of their insurance, we help with collective bargaining, we grieve civil service grievances, and, sometimes, we are just the protector. We are the card in the wallet, a phone number and a phone that the officers know they can count on in a very increasingly violent state.
Q: Lone Star Standard
How has the view of public safety and prosecution changed over time?
A: Charley Wilkinson
In America, somehow, we’re constantly going from one direction to another but we rarely find the center, which is where good government comes from. I’m not talking about political thought or right to express, but policy and how things work, whether the trains run on time, whether you have enough police officers in the street to do the job, those kinds of things are decided by public policy.
For all of my 65 years, the district attorney in Texas was, by and large, a nonpolitical person. They wound up being in the party that was in power but their job was a benign, almost scientific position of prosecuting criminals. Of course, you had situations where people were let go and not prosecuted, where decisions were made based on the discretion of the office about whether, maybe, a kid had answered all the questions and could be given a ride home versus someone who’s committed a criminal act and needs to be taken to jail.
What’s happening now is you have a political train-of-thought on the progressive side of the Democrat Party that has decided the problem is that the laws are wrong. And the solution is not going to be to gain the upper hand in the legislative bodies and change the world and ask voters whether they agree the laws are wrong and should be changed. Their solution is to just not prosecute the laws even though the laws remain the same. The peoples voice remains the same. They believe that a thousand guns in the back of your trunk, that you are probably a gun runner.
So, what we are seeing in these big cities – and it’s not just Travis County – the issue exists but is less strong in Harris, Bexar, and Dallas counties. They have just decided that there are entire categories of crime that are just going to be forgiven. They’re just jumping in front of the criminal justice process and saying “we’re not going to prosecute them, so let them go.”
Q: Lone Star Standard
What are some of the priorities for CLEAT and its members for the legislative session in 2025?
A: Charley Wilkison
We need to make sure that we continue down this path, a good path the legislature put us on with defunding the police. That needs to stop. And, so the legislature put that in statute that a major urban area could not defund its police department. I put a little amendment on there that was led by Democrat Abel Herrero from the Corpus Christi area that said they could also not defund the police retirement system. I just looked ahead and could see that coming. I’ve been in the job long enough that I knew if they can’t defund the police department, they’d just defund the pension.
So, I think that’s the path we have to continue to go down. I also think we have to look at district attorneys and those kinds of issues. We believe we need to look at the officers right to a hearing when they are accused. Now that is decided locally by Chapter 143. And, so we’d like to see the officers have certain inalienable rights of hearings when they are accused by the drug dealers or certain criminal defense attorneys, politicians, whoever winds up being angry at the officer. We’d like to see the officer at least get a hearing and have due process rights under the law the same way any American would have.
Those are the types of things we don’t have in 2024. Today, we have large sectors of police officers, deputy sheriffs out working today, they don’t even have due process rights. If they’re accused, they can just be railroaded right out of their job. And that’s a very political situation.
Charley Wilkison is the Executive Director of CLEAT, the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas. Charley worked on his first political campaign in the spring of 1976 for a County Sheriff race in the Texas Primary. Prior to joining CLEAT in 1994, Charley’s governmental experience included the U.S. Congress, Texas Senate, and Texas House of Representatives.
This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Listen to the full discussion here: https://texas-talks.simplecast.com/episodes/ep-6-charley-wilkison
