Council OKs inter-local S.W.A.T. team agreement

By Luke Dugosh| For The Gazette

City council approved an inter-local agreement between the City of Pittsburg Police Department and the City of Mount Pleasant Police Department concerning Special Weapons and Tactics Team (S.W.A.T. Team) during the April 10 meeting.
“We’ve had to take and utilize different teams in the past…there’s more and more of a concept of a regionalized team now…we would place one member of the police department on the team,” said Pittsburg Police Chief Richard Penn. 
Penn said SWAT members would be the same training and same rigorous standards. 
“It’s not weapons, its more tactics. This gives us an opportunity to take and do some pre-planning…to where actually we have someone on the ground that has that degree of training,” he said. “The department currently has some of that degree of training; however, it is not what you would call nationally recognized training. This will allow us to take whenever we needed to call in a team whether it would be a Mount Pleasant team or be a Longview team, a Tyler team, this would allow us to have a member, an actually S.W.A.T. trained member on the ground to be able to predict where we need to be. The officer would also be a member of that team and would be subject to call-out on an incident that the team responded to.”

For complete story, read April 20 issue