MERCEDES — Officials here welcomed a new police chief on Friday — the sixth such person to lead the department since 2019.
“I can’t change what happened in the past, but I can change what we do from now on. Let’s change our reputation and stay positive,” longtime lawman Pedro Estrada said to a room full of Mercedes police officers, city commissioners and city staff Friday afternoon.
Estrada’s remarks — made just prior to being sworn in by Mercedes municipal Judge Juan Alvarez — addressed head-on the department’s recent history of community distrust exacerbated by a revolving door of leadership since the retirement of Chief Olga Maldonado in the summer of 2019.
Maldonado led the Queen City’s police force for three decades. Some of her successors went on to serve as few as seven months before abruptly resigning.
First came Dagoberto “Dago” Chavez, under whose leadership four residents were arrested during a public meeting. He served as chief for a year-and-a-half before resigning.
Next came Juan Mancias, followed by Roy A. Quintanilha, who retired last December. In January, Mercedes’ first woman assistant chief, Blanca Sanchez, was named interim chief.
Estrada aims to put an end to the trend of short-term chiefs.
“Hopefully, I am — and will be — the last chief that Mercedes will have. There is gonna be no more. I am very positive of that,” Estrada said shortly after his swearing in ceremony at Mercedes City Hall.
The new chief has plans to begin rebuilding community trust by repairing relationships between the police department and the community and school district.
“He was very specific about specific things that we need to target. We talked about community outreach. We talked about having improved relations with the schools and the big businesses around the area,” Mercedes City Manager Alberto Perez said.
The city manager said Estrada rose to the top of the list of about 20 candidates who applied for the job. Of those, about half a dozen made it to the final round of interviews.
But what set Estrada apart was his existing relationship with the department.
Estrada came to Mercedes PD last May and worked his way up from a patrol officer to the head of the department’s criminal investigators.
That experience meant his fellow officers already know his personality and leadership style, Perez said.
“The staff knows him already, so it’s not like they have to figure out how he operates or not. He’s obviously from day one going to hit the ground running,” Perez said.
Prior to joining the Mercedes Police Department, Estrada spent more than two decades in Starr County, primarily doing drug interdiction.
“(I) started in 2000 with the combined taskforce,” Estrada said, referring to a law enforcement unit that combined officers from local, state and federal agencies. The taskforce was tasked with combating drug trafficking.
“From there we went to HIDTA,” he said, referring to the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program, which similarly combines the efforts of multiple law enforcement agencies.
In June 2020, the Starr County HIDTA task force was disbanded after the board overseeing such units in South Texas voted to pull its federal funding over concerns of “terrible mismanagement,” Gocha Allen Ramirez, 229th Judicial District Attorney, said during a December 2020 interview with The Monitor.
According to Ramirez, the executive board had been considering dismantling the unit since 2017 due to the unit’s alleged failure to cooperate with federal agencies, misusing HIDTA vehicles, “making up numbers” and other allegations.
The unit — which was defunded and disbanded under the leadership of the previous district attorney, Omar Escobar — was later reinstated after Ramirez prevailed in the November 2020 election and took office the following January.
Estrada served on the Starr County HIDTA taskforce at the time it was disbanded, but not in a leadership role, he said. He attributed its dismantling to a shift in the political climate.
“It got disbanded because of the new administration that came in. Of course, with a new administration comes new investigators,” Estrada said.
After his time in HIDTA, he became a reserve officer for the Starr County Sheriff’s Office while pursuing continuing law enforcement education during the year before coming to Mercedes.
Estrada said he’s eager to meet with the community and repair any rifts that exist.
“I’m all about transparency. So, I invite the citizens of Mercedes to come over to the department to express their concerns, any questions they might have so we can address them in a proper way,” Estrada said.
“There’s been issues in the past with previous administrations, but we want to make a positive impact. We want to change that,” he said.
