PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
March 31, 2007
JERRY DEFOOR
I and other members of your Board of Directors have recently received complaints about The Retired Badge newspaper. These complaints have been about its lateness and about a series of negative articles that they believe are inappropriate and disrespectful of HPD brothers and sisters.
The Board will be discussing both these issues at the next meeting, April 12, 2007. The meeting will begin at our usual time, 8:30 AM. It is open to all members and approved guests.
Regarding the lateness of the paper, we think the problem exists with the postal service. It appears that our papers are not expedited because we mail our paper as bulk class. The postal service does not seem to care when they process this class mail.
I recall that we had a similar problem with the old Badge and Gun when I was a Director of the Houston Police Officers Association back in the 70’s. We found that the Badge and Gun was left on the back porch of the downtown post office for many days, some times weeks, before anyone distributed them to our members. We just had to grin and bear it for a while. After some time, and many talks with many people including the Postmaster, the postal service made an effort to distribut the paper a little faster. Nelson Zoch is investigating all the problems about the distribution of the newspaper and will make a report and recommendation to the board on April 12th.
The other issue is more problematic and is a difficult issue to address. To bring everyone up to date I will explain what I believe the issue is. A member of our association submitted a series of articles for publication in the Retired Badge iterating his thoughts about his experiences while working at the Houston Police Department. He has been retired for several years, so he was reminiscing about events that occurred several years ago. That’s fine for members to do, in fact, I encourage all who are interested to write about things that have occurred to them or that they have observed. Many of our members enjoy reading these stories.
So, what is the problem? I believe, and all who have called or discussed this with me agree, it is not beneficial, helpful, respectful or sensitive of the feelings of others, nor in the best interest of our organization, to be disrespectful, hurtful or mean spirited while reminiscing about experiences written for publication in our Retired Badge or on our website.
We, as a Board, are challenged by this issue to establish editorial guidelines that preserve the free flow of opinions from our membership while protecting the integrity of our association. The majority of the board members agree that such editorial guidelines governing the content of the Retired Badge must be established.
Another issue has been noted that there are also some omissions in the delegated authority of the Chairperson of the Retired Badge Committee. These issues will be the primary issues to be discussed at the April board meeting.
As a closing note of this article, I want all of you to know that I sincerely regret that we did not take action to issue appropriate guidelines for the Retired Badge before these articles were written and published. I recognize that I was personally negligent by failing to bring this issue to the Board after the first article was published. I sincerely apologize for these articles and for the hurt and bad feelings that I know has been experienced by the offended HPD brothers and sisters and their families. 
