After a successful week of hosting the Honor Guard Academy, the Levelland Police Department and South Plains College recognized the law enforcement personnel for the participation of the academy.
The Levelland Police Chief Albert Garcia explained that the academy is something the department and other departments across the region have been wanting to put in place for a long time.
The initiative is to try and train more and more law enforcement departments or any public safety agency that may have an honor guard.
With collectively training different agencies across the board in the same manner, to train the same type of policy procedures and movements will be common.
“There’s a lot more that goes along with an honor guard than just presenting the colors at special events or doing things at funerals,” explained Chief Garcia. “There’s very precise movements that happen when you are part of the honor guard and what this initiative does is try to train more and more agencies to do the same thing.”
Chief Garcia says the commonality shared between different agencies proves to be beneficial for everyone involved.
“The Honor Guard Academy is something that we have sponsored and this particular class for agencies in our region,” said Chief Garcia. “The collective participating in this is between some of the state or the state agencies, the Texas Department of Public Safety and some of the federal agencies and primarily the Border Patrol.”
Chief Garcia added that he hopes the program continues.
“All of these agencies will be able to respond to different events and perform together because they’ll all understand what each other is doing exactly,” said Chief Garcia. “As something that the state and Border Patrol have been trying to initiate for some time now for several years, it’s just now starting to get up off the ground. With the recent development of our honor guard, I thought man what a great opportunity for us to have agencies come into our city and see what Levelland has to offer and those kind of things like that.”
Additionally, have various agencies trained the same will allow everyone to do the same thing regardless of Levelland guard having to go and perform with Lubbock County or Stephenville PD. “This was a very unique experience and I’m pretty excited about it,” said Chief Garcia. “For our honor guard that we put together, we have a lot of officers that our policy basically dictates that once you get hired as a Levelland Police Officer or on the department you are immediately put on the guard.”
Chief Garcia also added that many of the guys will serve for a year and many of them will continue as it is a prestigious position “I appreciate them for doing that and I for one think that we have really done a lot of good things as far as the honor guard is concerned,” said Chief Garcia. “We really look really well whenever we perform and we’re only going to get better from here on out.”
Chief Garcia explained that the ability for agency personnel to come on board and be part of the honor guard and actually see that the honor guard isn’t just about marching, presenting, colors, or performance is big.
“Honor guard is about exactly what’s in its title,” said Chief Garcia. “It’s about the honor and honoring somebody for what they’ve done. the service they’ve provided whether it’s us presenting colors at the veteran breakfast or whether it’s us protecting the casket of a fallen officer.”
Unfortunately, for the Levelland PD Honor Guard they have had to protect caskets the last couple of years.
“The privilege it is for our guys to be able to do those kinds of things and to just let family members know how much we cared about their family,” said Chief Garcia.
To help new personnel that have joined the staff, Chief Garcia immediately puts those individuals on the honor guard to show them the importance of what everything means.
“We put them on our honor guard immediately upon being hired is so that they do understand what it means. There’s more to the badge then just wearing it. I think it’s pretty cool.
Classes were scheduled throughout the week with all day classroom portions and afternoon walk-through’s.
Kenny Burns and the South Plains College Law Enforcement program oversaw the training portion and were pleased with what they saw.
At the culmination of the academy, all law enforcement personnel involved in the training made their way to Krestridge Funeral Home in Levelland where they would practice the changing of guard during funeral services.
After a while, the big test began with a mock funeral that included the proper procedure at the funeral home in addition to the burial services at the cemetery.
All law enforcement agencies would travel to the City of Levelland Cemetery located on Avenue H.
There personnel went through multiple training runs before the mock burial began.
Without fail, both phases of the mock funeral went off without problems.
To end the academy, all involved parties made their way to the Levelland Fire Station where Chief Garcia and other agencies would speak and recognize two groups for their hard work during the academy.