Council members grill APD, DPS chiefs over partnership’s impacts on Black and Latino Austinites

City Council questioned leaders of the Austin Police Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety on Tuesday about the disparate impacts its policing partnership is having on communities of color throughout Austin.

The briefings took place during Tuesday’s work session. Mayor Kirk Watson opened with a statement reminding his colleagues that last year they’d voted down the four-year police labor agreement in order to make time for voters to weigh in on two police oversight ballot measures this summer. That decision had “ripple effects” that Council must now address, he said. He noted that APD currently has more than 300 open positions.

“Our staffing challenge isn’t likely to change anytime soon, even if we were to strike a deal on a four-year contract with the police union tomorrow. So how do we address the immediate needs of Austinites while we work our way through this appropriate conversation?”

Watson said the partnership has resulted in faster 911 call response times and a reduction in violent crime.

“The traffic enforcement, however, has been troubling,” he said. “If there have been unintended or unwanted consequences, we must address them immediately. We want to ensure Austinites don’t fear that they’ll be racially profiled or targeted by this effort.”

Watson said programs can have both “desirable and less desirable” results and the answer is to recalibrate, “such as deploying differently so that one place or a few places in Austin don’t feel unduly targeted.” He said it would be important going forward for Council to continue monitoring the data and use it to make other changes going forward.

“I think this Council should be proud that it has been proactively addressing policing and public safety at a time when there aren’t easy answers,” Watson said.

APD Chief Joseph Chacon said the partnership’s traffic enforcement strategies have been high visibility in areas where a significant number of serious injury and fatal crashes occur. In terms of violent crime, Chacon said the departments have focused patrols on areas with high call volumes for 911 assistance.

“Our initial focus really was on main roadways such as Interstate Highway 35, Mopac and 183,” he said. “We have expanded those to include Highway 360, 290 and 71. And we are now adding other streets that are not necessarily those major roadways, but are still traveled quite a bit. And we are seeing much of the same behavior.”

APD chief data officer Jonathan Kringen said the city has seen continued reductions in violent crime during week four of the operation. That amounts to an approximately 26 percent lower violent crime compared to the same week last year, and about 35 percent lower compared to the week before the partnership began.

“I want to clarify, there has been a lot of confusion about the week before the partnership began,” Kringen said. “There were 128 violent crimes that occurred in the week before the partnership began. So the change from that week to the first week, which was reported at 67, was remarkably substantial.”

Kringen said that “no matter what comparison we’re making, what you see is a reduction across the board” in violent crime.

Texas DPS Director Steve McCraw thanked the mayor and Council members for their service, and said the troopers appreciate the treatment they’ve received from the community since the start of the operation. He also emphasized that Chacon is “in charge” but that DPS is capable of providing on-demand patrol officers – which is something he said no other agency is able to do.

“From a department standpoint, one thing we do is we patrol actively and it’s all crime all the time,” McCraw said. “And that includes traffic enforcement. And that’s just how we handle things. We don’t give troopers a discretion to pick which laws, traffic laws, they enforce and don’t enforce.”

He said there are robust controls in place to protect against racial profiling, which he called “antithetical to professional policing.” He said that DPS collects data at the county level, and the demographic data on arrests is consistent with the demographics of Austin and Travis County. “That’s not unexpected,” he said of a large increase in the amount of stops of Hispanic and Latino drivers.

McCraw said the initiative has already resulted in more than 11,000 traffic stops. Over the past four weeks, DPS has assisted APD on 1,159 occasions, and the partnership has resulted in 780 total arrests. Of those arrests, 320 were misdemeanor arrests and 460 were felony arrests. The operation has recovered 44 stolen vehicles, 1.5 pounds of cocaine, 1.3 pounds of heroin, 355 pounds of methamphetamine, 22 pounds of marijuana and 2.1 pounds of fentanyl.

Data from the Travis County Attorney’s Office showed that nine out of 10 people arrested on misdemeanor charges in the operation thus far are Black or Latino. McCraw’s data found that 54 percent of the traffic stops conducted during the operation were of Hispanic or Latino residents. Black residents, which make up less than 10 percent of the city’s overall population, accounted for 15 percent of the traffic stops. White Austinites, who make up more than 66 percent of the city’s population, accounted for just 26 percent of the arrests.

After the briefings, Watson asked if the patrols could be adjusted to help alleviate community concerns about racial profiling. McCraw reiterated that he would continue to follow Chacon’s wishes in the location and timing of the patrols. Watson then directed the question to Chacon, who said that he would change the strategy in response to Council members who received complaints from constituents.

“It’s important to recognize that those areas are where we have our 911 calls for emergency service coming in. We can’t lose sight of that, and we have seen drops in violent crime,” Chacon said.

Several Council members raised concerns about transparency and the impacts of the partnership on communities of color. Council Member Vanessa Fuentes, who represents Southeast Austin, said the lack of data and transparency surrounding the agreement has caused “confusion and concerns” from the communities she represents. She pointed out that of the traffic stops this month, only 6 percent resulted in arrests.

“To me, what that means is that 11,000 Austinites were pulled over and stopped, were given a warning. How is that ensuring the safety of our communities, especially since we know that the patrolling has been in our communities of color?” Fuentes said. McCraw responded that he doesn’t view DPS presence in a community in a negative light. “In fact, the community is much safer when we go into it,” McCraw said.

Council Member Alison Alter said she wasn’t able to easily obtain data about the partnership, and that there is a breakdown in how the statistics regarding arrest demographics are communicated between entities. She also asked for clarity regarding how many DPS officers are currently in Austin on a daily basis, and McCraw said that number is approximately 100. The troopers are coming into Austin from other parts of the state and working 12-hour shifts on a rotating basis.

Alter said she would like to see more DPS patrols on major roadways that the city’s Vision Zero plan pointed to as traffic fatality hot spots. That strategy would allow the city to move closer to its goal of reducing traffic fatalities. She said she would like to see a more strategic approach to where the patrols are being deployed.

“I would like to see it be a more strategic approach, would very much like that traffic enforcement to be spread more broadly, have more of the support for our investigative units, which have been depleted with the staffing shortages, and see if there are ways to do the proactive violent crime enforcement without folks feeling like there’s a checkpoint set up in their community,” she said.

Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison expressed concern about what she called an “exclusively data-driven approach” to policing and the implications of overlooking other underlying issues at play in the situation.

“Let’s call it an octopus, right? It’s got tentacles, eight of ’em, maybe more, that aren’t rooted in data,” Harper-Madison said. “They’re rooted in poverty, they’re rooted in social justice, they’re rooted in social injustice, they’re rooted in racism, they’re rooted in over-policing.”

Harper-Madison said there are problematic areas in town that don’t lie within the areas that are currently being targeted in the operation.

“I’m just trying to figure out how do we reconcile the imbalance, recognizing that, statistically, there are not fewer crimes being committed over here than there are over there. But these people who struggle the hardest, once you involve criminal justice in their lives – I can’t tell you, it’s irreconcilable. So frequently these people cannot pull themselves back out of that criminal justice involvement. Whereas these folks over here can hire a good attorney. Never happened. I just am having a difficult time speaking to my constituents about the imbalance.”

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