How Respect Is Earned, and Why Forcing It Puts Everyone in Danger

I never planned to write about what goes on inside the El Paso Police Department. Yesterday, while deleting old emails, I found one I had missed. After rereading it and speaking with multiple officers who still carry the weight of what it describes, I realized the story is too important, and too dangerous, to stay quiet.

Respect is not something you can order people to feel. It is built slowly, deliberately, through consistent honorable behavior: keeping your word, listening more than you speak, owning your mistakes, treating every person with dignity, setting fair boundaries, and staying humble enough to keep learning. Do these things long enough and respect arrives on its own. Demand it with threats, favoritism, or rank, and you breed the opposite: resentment, fear, and eventually catastrophe.

That is exactly what is happening at the Northeast Regional Command Center under Lieutenant Christopher Jones and the recently appointed Officer in Charge, Sergeant L. Castro.

Officers from multiple shifts and substations paint a strikingly consistent picture. Castro, they say, has repeatedly failed specialized units, including the relatively low-pressure role of Field Training Officer. Complaints about her conduct were either filed or seriously considered in the past, yet instead of retraining or meaningful accountability, she was simply moved to another unit, a practice officers bitterly call “failing upward.”

“She can’t even function in a specialized unit,” one officer told me. “I can’t say if it’s the pressure, the tasks she must perform, her attitude, or some mix of them all. She’s a washout here.”

“Castro, and I don’t want to get in trouble here,” said another officer who currently works under her and fears retaliation, “she should not be a cop. I just don’t know how else to say it. Castro has let the badge and power go to her head. I’m going to transfer out of the NERCC because of her.”

“I heard,” said an officer from a different substation, “that when she was on the evening shift, they all filed, or wanted to file a complaint against her. She’s not cut out to be an OIC. She’s bounced around too much, like a jack of all trades and a master of none.”

“No one respects her, and now Jones wants to force that respect,” another officer added. “I don’t even want to show up for work with those two there.”

When Lt. Jones announced Castro’s appointment as OIC and eventually followed it with a memo warning of investigations, discipline, and possible relief from duty for anyone who failed to show her the “same respect” given to himself and the permanent sergeants, the message landed like a hammer: respect her , or else.

The email from Jones is below. Do give it a read.

That approach does not build respect. It destroys it. By threatening an entire shift into pretending to admire a supervisor, Jones unwittingly broadcast that Castro cannot command respect on her own merits. Good leaders back their people publicly while correcting them privately and giving them room to grow. Weak leaders hide behind threats because they either don’t trust the person they just promoted or refuse to confront real problems head-on.

Officers say Castro too often escalates when she should de-escalate. “You asked about de-escalation?” one told me. “She’s gas being tossed on a fire when you really need water.”

“She needs to put her ego in check,” said another. “She’s a danger the way she is.”

An officer from outside the Northeast Command who has heard the stories from friends summed it up this way: “This is not how one serves their fellow officers, commanding by fear and oppression. I can only imagine the level of officer morale in the Northeast. I also can’t understand how the Commander there sees this, the unnatural bond between Jones and Castro, and the implicit threat in Jones’ email, and is comfortable with it.”

When officers are afraid of their own supervisors instead of focused on the mission, the damage does not stay inside the station. It spills onto the street, into every call, every traffic stop, every split-second decision where hesitation or anger born of a toxic workplace can cost someone their life. When the public sees favoritism and intimidation rewarded instead of competence and character, trust in the badge erodes. When trust erodes, people stop calling the police, stop cooperating, stop testifying, and the entire community becomes less safe.

The overwhelming majority of El Paso police officers show up every day determined to do one of the hardest jobs in America with honor. They deserve leaders who make that job easier, not harder. They deserve a department that promotes based on proven ability and integrity, not connections or convenience. They deserve a chain of command that understands respect cannot be manufactured through fear.

Until the City of El Paso demands better, until it restructures promotions, accountability, and leadership selection so that competence and character matter more than loyalty to the wrong people, the damage will keep spreading. And the ones who will pay the highest price are the citizens who depend on their police department to protect and serve, not intimidate and oppress.

Respect is earned, one honorable act at a time. Anything less puts every officer, and every life they are sworn to protect, in danger.