Today, I’m here with Jeff Aguirre. A central Texas native who’s running against current Sheriff Parnell McNamara for the Republican nomination of McLennan county Sheriff in the 2024 March primaries.
Thank you for being here, Jeff.
JEFF: “Thank you for having me.”
So, you were born and raised here in Waco, right?
JEFF: “Yep, right down the street.”
And you chose to raise your own family here. What brought you guys back here, what’s so special about the community and this county to you guys?
JEFF: “I’ve never left, you know my wife is a transplant. I attended school in Valley Mills, but we lived on the McLennan county side of the border when that happened. And then following high school, I just found myself building a house out in that area and just staying there. Now granted, I say I’ve never left, I’ve traveled the world, I was gone for about eight and a half years. But I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in McLennan county, we’re centrally located between Austin and Dallas, especially now with all of the growth that we are having. This is one of the best places ever.”
You have been involved in McLennan county law enforcement for a whole now. Why decide to run for Sheriff now?
JEFF: “Oh I think, I think my experience lends for it. I think the timing is right. I think it’s a timing issue. This was not something that I approached lightly. I mean it was months of discussion with the friends and the family, just trying to get a pulse on whether or not we thought we’d be successful. And I just think the timing was right to do it right now.”
Parnell will be finishing his third term as sheriff and is running for reelection. Are you satisfied with the work he has done?
JEFF: “You know, that’s somewhat a loaded question. I don’t think it's been a bad job. I think it could have been better. I think what we started with, had the makings of an excellent department. Somewhere along the path, I think he lost sight of the picture. I think things happened that other people saw, just like I did. Other people left, just like I did. Ultimately, it's just gotten to a point where people are not satisfied. So when I say it's a loaded question, my answer to that question is yes, when we started this it was amazing. And it has slowly tapered off since then. And I don’t know if that is complacency, I don’t know if that's just not being engaged or not understanding the mission to keep moving forward, but I think it can and should have been done a little better.”
You’ve had a career in law enforcement for over 25 years and during that time you’ve held many different positions. You were an international police advisor in Afghanistan, correct?
JEFF: “Yes.”
And also a United Nations police officer in Haiti.
JEFF: “Correct.”
What have you learned from your previous roles that makes you prepared for the responsibilities of the Sheriff's office?
JEFF: “The one thing that comes to mind first when you say that is diversity. You know, when you’re in Afghanistan, it's not just the Afghans and the Americans. We had Nepalis security forces that rode with us, we had other security elements from South Africa to New Zealand. Romania. All around the world, we are always interacting with different cultures. And a place like Afghanistan is just ripe with different tribal cultures and different languages and different beliefs and subsets and religion. I think there's more than a couple of dozen different languages spoken across Afghanistan, and the same with Haiti. Once we got there, and you start dealing with the Haitians, you have your mission and you have your focus, but you have to be successful utilizing all the other UN countries that are there with you. It’s not just your mission or your focus, you might have the goal in sight, but you gotta put them on your team, you gotta give them a job. And I think that's what I bring to the table from my international experience, is different cultures, different religions, different beliefs, different languages, just a different way of approaching people to be successful.”
So, if you were elected Sheriff how would you ensure that the department would reflect the diverse community that we do have here in McLennan county?
JEFF: “You know, I think there is an approach that we’ve missed out on. I think there needs to be a bigger focus, and I think Waco PD has a grasp on community oriented policing. It's not just being seen or it's not just jumping in a parade and putting the vehicles out there on display and saying, ‘look at what we have.’ I think there is a part of us that needs to be engaged in the community. Getting out of the car, having meet and greets, go to a coffee shop once a week, let people know who’s out there protecting them and develop those personal relationships, and I think that's an opportunity that's been lost.”
What are your main goals in this election and, if elected, what changes would you like to see implemented into the Sheriff's office under your leadership?
JEFF: “Okay, so my main goals are just to win.”
[LAUGHTER]
JEFF: “Let's call it for what it is, I wanna win. You know, there comes a certain measure of personal growth when you do something like this. I always thought I had it in me, I always thought I could do it. I always thought, ‘I can’t be that bad, let's just run it up and see what happens.’ When you get into something like this you start realizing how many people feel disenfranchised, how many people don’t feel like they’re being heard. How many people don’t feel included, or they feel they’ve been picked on or ostracized or that nobody is listening. Regardless of whatever their problem is, real or made up, they can’t get any attention to their problem. And everybody has a problem, you know. We’ve come to understand that if we are gonna be successful at this, we have to be approachable. We have to be knowledgeable and we have to be compassionate. I’m not saying you don’t put bad guys in jail, you absolutely put bad guys in jail. It’s very rarely that you see a duplicate situation when you're out on a call. You know, one of the first things I learned when I was out on patrol, I started my career out in Hewitt, I had a supervisor ask me, ‘why do we pull people over?’ I said what any rookie would say, I said we pull people over to write tickets. He said no, you interact with the public from this position to gain compliance with the law. He says it's your job to go up there, make contact with a person, and determine what it's going to take. Is it a verbal warning? Is it a written warning? Is it a ticket? Or does this person need to go to jail? And you have three minutes to figure that out. Every situation is different, every person has their own set of problems. You have to be an authoritarian, or authoritative, not an authoritarian. You have to be authoritative. You have to be a counselor, you have to be a little bit of a psychologist on some of these stops. But that has been one of the things that has stuck with me my entire career, is that not everybody is the same. They might be committing the same crime, but their motives are different, their reasons are different, the way that they did it is different and you have to take that into consideration. It doesn’t change the fact that they need to go to jail, but you gotta be able to see and be compassionate in your dealings.”
How would you describe your leadership style?
JEFF: “I like to say lead from the front, that's such a cliche. I care about other people's success, and I’ve said this before, you know, our job as a leader is to prepare people for success. Give them the tools that they need, encourage them to believe that they can accomplish things that they don't believe they can accomplish, and you set them up for success. When they win, that becomes their new normal, and they grow. So, my leadership style is growth. I want everybody succeeding, everybody growing. I don't need to be on the front page. If we have a successful operation, you know, my entire career has been being successful and letting somebody else stand up there and take the credit. That's what we do in narcotics, that's what we did overseas. You know when we built programs and plans over there, the government, they spent the money and they get the credit. I think on something like this, you put your people out front, you let them have the credit, you let them grow. The only time you see, the only time you should see your leaders, is when something goes wrong and you stand up there and you own the failure, you own the mistake. Look inside and say, ‘did I give them every opportunity that they need to be able to pull that off?’ And if the answer, truthfully, is no, then you failed them. They didn’t fail the mission, you failed the people. We’ve gotta be cognizant of that moving forward, we gotta set our people up for success. And that's not to say it hasn't been done, it just hasn't been done a lot.”
What steps will you take to enhance transparency and accountability within the sheriff's office?
JEFF: “How much time do we have? That's one of the main reasons I started to do this. There's not a lot of transparency, there's not a lot of accountability in that office. I’ve said this many times from a stage and I’ll say it here again, this is not a campaign against my opponent, it's a campaign for myself, it's for McLennan county. Now that being said, the people in that department that are currently there and that have a post administration vision, if they can have that vision so can I. But I want to be out here earning it from people, I want to stand in front of people, let them ask me the hard questions and I’m gonna stand here. That's the transparency part of that. Let's talk about what really matters, let's debate each other, let's ask each other the hard questions. As I understand it, that's not gonna happen and that's sad because the voting public doesn’t get the full picture, they don't get to do their due diligence and find out and pick the best candidate for the job. It shouldn’t be a popularity contest. Accountability, when you take care of a few people to make sure that they succeed and you neglect the masses, they tend to leave. They tend to go somewhere else. They want to be appreciated, so they go somewhere else. That's the accountability part of that answer. There hasn't been anybody in that administration, beneath the Sheriff himself, to hold people accountable. They haven’t had to be held accountable, they’ve gotten to basically just have kind of free reign of what they wanted to do. They’ve worked their way up and they’ve pushed people out, and they have a group inside there that covers for, well not covers for each other, that's a bad term, but they look out for each other. They want to make sure that each other in that group is successful, and not successful as a whole. Somebody told me one time that it's not that they don't want you to be successful, it's that they don't want you to be successful if they have their fingerprints on it. And what did we talk about a while ago? It's not about us that makes the success, you set them up and let them have it.”
Kind of going off transparency, you mentioned in an interview that I watched that one of the first things you plan on doing if you do get elected is to make sure that every deputy has a body camera. Is this still the case and if so, why do you think they are essential for officers to have and also why do you believe not every officer has them as of right now?
JEFF: “I don’t know why we don’t have them. You know there are grants, there are ways to get them. They are absolutely necessary. They serve two purposes, they document the public interaction with the officer but they also document the officers interaction with the public. If you’ve got an officer that's problematic or condescending, you’ve gotten complaints that he talks bad to people or he’s not complassionate or he’s not approachable. That's a self correcting problem when you put a body camera on him. He’s gonna act a little different. By the same measure, when you’re out in public and you’re doing the best you can to control the peace, and people approach you and they're not compliant or they're not agreeable with what you’re doing, you’re going to have to escalate. And when you do, that's documented. Unfortunately, we’ve been in a couple of high threat level situations here, shots were fired, and there were no body cameras. So it's a hard thing to swallow, when you spend your entire life trying to build your family, your legacy, and you go through that and you don't know. Is that jury gonna see what I saw? Are they gonna hear what I heard? Are they gonna feel what I feel? And if not, who’s gonna take care of my family? Who's gonna pay my bills? Who's gonna look out for me? Those body cameras do so much for the officers and the public, it's a shame that we don't have them already. And truthfully, I can’t understand, there’s not a good reason why we don’t already have them.”
How do you plan on approaching McLennan County’s specific behavioral health needs in the community and ensuring that those with mental illness get the treatment they need?
JEFF: “You know one of the things I’ve been looking at here lately is, we have an MHMR unit within the Sheriff's department, we have MHMR deputies. We are supposed to have a unit of five but I think right now they are running with a unit of one, that's problematic in and of itself when you get into this topic. There are some programs starting out of Austin, in Travis county where there is a diversion program. There is more of a focus on taking people with MHMR needs and making sure they don’t end up in jail. Jail is not where they need to be. You know, are they cognizant of the fact they are committing a crime? Do they have a place to go? Are they doing what they are doing to get out of the freezing cold rain? You know, there's a bunch of stuff there. To answer your question, start looking at what we’re doing in other communities, and not just Austin, but Dallas, and the places around us that focus on MHMR needs.
The city of Waco recently released its final quarterly report from 2023, and while the crimes against people have gone down 9.2 percent from last year, homicide offenses have increased. Last quarter there were just 1, this year there were 7. How do you plan on making this number go down and ensuring that people feel safe in the county?
JEFF: “You know, that's in the city of Waco, and I don’t have the crime stats for what happens out in the county. I will tell you, with my current job, a lot of those issues might be gang related or shooting related. To control those numbers all I can say is that we just have to be available to help Waco. We have to have a lot of inner agency agreements where we can come in and help them when they need it, and I think we do for the most part. But the Waco problems, the problems they have here in the city, they differ from what's happening out in the county. We don’t have the groups, the cliques, the gangs. The schools out in the county aren’t as affected by the fights, and the aggression, and the assaultive offenses as they are here in the city. So, that being said, how we can combat that is to do whatever Waco asks us to do, if we can spare the manpower and we can help them out. We work together, we’re on the same team, we just wear different uniforms.”
In all of those homicides, they did involve a firearm, which you mentioned. How do you plan on promoting gun safety and responsibility in the community? It may be different than in the city, like you mentioned, but how do you target those communities and how do you promote responsible gun use?
JEFF: “Well I think gun safety is kinda universal. First and foremost, I am not a fan of anything that limits gun ownership, the use of firearms, or the ability to carry your firearms. I believe that's a 2A issue, it's written in stone and is non-negotiable. I also think that when you have rural areas, those guns belong to moms, dads, hunters and fishermen. And you have a high population of children that are also hunters and fishermen. To get their license, they have to go through hunter safety courses. Hunter safety courses generate a much higher level of responsible gun owners. They understand the effects of mistreating a firearm. I think that's probably the biggest difference, I think it's a self correcting problem, because they learn it early on in the rural areas because they have to, they want to go hunting and fishing with mom and dad.”
Something that the current Sheriff department really prides itself on is their fight against human trafficking. How would you ensure these efforts continue and what, if anything, would you change if you were elected Sheriff?
JEFF: “If I was elected Sheriff I would try to get the human trafficking guy to come back to work, cause he left the sheriff's department.”
Really?
JEFF: “Mhm. He’s part of the 71 supervisors that have left in the last 10 years. We currently don’t have a human trafficking unit.”
At all?
JEFF: “They have people that are working those cases but it’s not near as diligent, or as hard, or as effective as it was.”
So, would that be something you would want to change if you were elected?
JEFF: “Absolutely. It’s absolutely needed, we have to protect the children in our community.”
That was the last question that I had. Is there anything else you would like voters to know about you before they cast their votes?
JEFF: "You know, I’d like to ask them to do their due diligence. This is a 28 year career coming down to one event, like we spoke about earlier. You know, I started in corrections here in McLennan county, I worked in a jail. I was on patrol. I was part of a criminal investigations division, I was part of special investigative units. I’ve got international experience building police departments in adverse conditions, you know, in two different war zones basically. I’ve done 17 years of organized crime, narcotics, undercover work here in McLennan county. I’m very well favored among my peers, my community. I’m very active in the community. I want people to understand that this candidacy, this attempt to become sheriff, is a look into the future. I want people to understand what we are gonna get next year, or the next year, or the next year. In the event that something were to happen, what do we end up with? And I just want people to know they have an option that's experienced, that's educated, that’s tested, and that’s ready to take over from day one. There’s not a learning curve here. I’ve been doing this for 28 years. Vote Jeff Aguirre. We start February 20th with early voting and it finishes up March 5th.”
Thank you so much, Jeff.
JEFF: “Absolutely, thank you for having me, I enjoyed it.”