Shady Deal at the Bexar County Jail?
KENS 5 Reports then Deletes. Why?
KENS 5 posted an article about the new Bexar County jail administrator, Jaime Rios. In their article they mentioned the close ties that Jaime Rios has with the female jail inspector who does the inspection of the Bexar County jail. Unfortunately, it seems that KENS didn’t stay true to their reporting convictions and deleted quite a bit of the information in the article. You can view the carcass of that article here.
About the only thing of value that KENS left was the one sentence that says, “He said they’ve never had any allegations of impropriety stemming from trainer and inspector relationships.” In the article it seems that the comment was made by Sheriff Javier Salazar but if I am remembering correctly from the original article, that comment was by someone at Jail Standards.
Questionable Relationship
So here’s the gist of the original article. Jaime Rios is a trainer for jail Standards. According to the story, he and the fairly new female inspector, who does the inspections of the Bexar County jail, seemed to have been in a close relationship. The original KENS article even showed a picture of them teaching a class together. That doesn’t necessarily imply they were intimate. It can just mean a close working relationship. It also doesn’t rule out the possibility. We are currently not in a position to know.
Conflicts of Interest
However, it would seem to us that it would automatically be a conflict of interest for a person to be working as a jail administrator and also teaching at Jail Standards. Reputations would be on the line. If there really is a close friendship between the TCJS inspector and the new jail administrator, Jaime Rios, it would be even more problematic. It could easily lead to the inspector giving the jail a passing score to make her partner look good. After all, Deputy Chief Jaime Rios is still a trainer for the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. He is the inspector’s co-worker. Won’t it look bad if the jail he is over keeps failing jail inspections?
For the first time in almost a year, the Bexar County jail passed their jail inspection. It’s ironic that they passed the inspection within days after Jaime Rios was hired and just as two inmates died, one of which was by suicide. Does this seem suspicious to anyone besides us? Why does it always feel like there is some kind of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ situation going on in the Salazar administration?
We suspect there is a whole lot more to this story that hasn’t come out yet. There needs to be some real investigative reporting by people who aren’t afraid of stirring the waters. KSAT Defenders, where are you?