SAN MARCOS POLICE DEPARTMENT
The Chief’s Advisory panel — a group that serves as the middleman between San Marcos Police Department, and specifically Chief Stan Standridge and the community — will be holding an event to allow the citizens of San Marcos to share their feedback on the work that SMPD is doing. The event will be held from 3 to 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, June 22 at the San Marcos Public Library.
“The panel is a group of 12 citizen members who represent the diversity of the city demographically in terms of types of residents,” said Stephanie Korcheck, Chief ’s Advisory Panel member. “Our purpose is to represent the community, to provide guidance to the chief as they’re thinking about policy, [and] to get information out about the department with the very clear distinction that we are not advocates for the department. Our job is not to make the department look good or to defend the department; our job is to provide information to the public about the department that they might not know about.”
Nicholas Costilla, Chief’s Advisory Panel member, said that there is a citizen representative on the CAP from each of the “major neighborhoods” in San Marcos as well as four employees of the police department and the assistant chief.
“Our purpose is just to make the chief aware of any issues that arise, not only within our own neighborhoods but within the city limits of San Marcos as well too,” Costilla said. “He will also give us information that we can disseminate to the citizens of San Marcos.”
Korcheck said, although the CAP has been around for a while, it recently enacted formal procedures to engage with the community.
“That has always been a stated purpose of the panel, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t happening; So we formalized that we’re going to do these two community feedback sessions, for lack of a better description, and the purpose is just simply to hear from the community,” Korcheck said. “We want to understand what the public thinks the department is doing well, what they need to improve on, what they don’t know and would like to know, so that the panel can really create a consistent dialog with the community [so] that they know we exist, that they know we represent them to the police chief and the department as a whole.”
Costilla added that CAP policies require that quarterly informational events are held.
Korcheck said the panel will be providing some information on SMPDs mental health initiatives as well as collecting feedback on various topics on Sunday.
“We’re going to receive information from the public in two different ways,” Korcheck said. “One is just having them write things down, and they’ll be able to filter through some different topics that we think are pertinent and write questions or comments and leave those for us. And then we’ll also have a feedback session where anybody who wants to say something can say it and/or ask a question. We may not know the answers to everything because, obviously, we’re not department employees; we don’t do this day to day, but we will provide answers both to those that show up as well as … on our website.”
The Chief’s Advisory Panel website is san marcostx.gov/3234/ Chiefs-Advisory-Panel.
Costilla said to email [email protected] “any comments, questions or concerns.” Those emails are monitored by two panel members and brought to the meetings for discussion.
