2004 "Austin Chronicle" Articles
07-15-04: 'Chronicle' sues city to release APD records
05-29-04: An Underground Effort to Recall APA's Sheffield
North Central Blues
APD's "Magnificent 7"
Operation Restore Hope
03-12-04: Oversight, Out of Mind
03-12-04: Anatomy of a Shooting
Unequal Farce
Page 2
The Figures Do Lie
Real Life, Real Numbers
Knee, Wynn, Futrell Austin's 'A' Team
The Real Race Problem
01-09-2004: Charges Dropped in APD Case - Olsen
01-02-2004: Naked City - No Charges for Chapman
01-02-2004: Top 10 APD Moments
Chapman out the door, off the hook

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You Can't Have That!
'Chronicle' sues city to release APD records
BY JORDAN SMITH

illustration by Doug Potter

At press time, the Chronicle was preparing for a hearing next week in Travis Co. district court to determine whether the city of Austin is required under state open-records law to release a year's worth of Austin Police Department time sheets and off-duty contract logs for two former APD officers who the city says are currently under investigation. The two officers, who resigned from the department earlier this year, are now employed with a private firm specializing in "homeland security" training – and questions have arisen about the financial relationship between the APD, the former officers, and that company. The city insists the public documents have been rendered exempt from disclosure because they now involve the "detection, investigation, or prosecution of crime."

At issue in the suit is whether the city can withhold routine and normally public administrative documents – such as the weekly time sheets filled out by every city employee, or the monthly off-duty logs filled out by police officers who maintain department-approved secondary employment – simply because those particular forms may now be under review during a subsequent criminal investigation. At issue in the documents themselves is whether APD officers may have "double-dipped" in some way by punching the department's clock at the same time they were actually working secondary, private-sector jobs.

On March 29, the Chronicle filed an open-records request with the APD, asking for one year's worth of time sheets and off-duty logs completed by two officers, Sgt. Steve Simank and Cpl. Craig Miller, who until recently were assigned to the department's homeland-defense detail. Earlier that month (on March 19), APD Cmdr. Ricky Hinkle had apparently filed an offense report alleging that two of his unit's officers had "tampered with a government record" – specifically, their own time sheets. (In response to our requests for documents, the APD released a version of that offense report as part of a "press release," although the officers are unnamed and it remains unclear how much information was withheld.) Just a week before, on March 12, Hinkle wrote that he "became aware of several time sheet concerns for two homeland [defense] employees as a result of their off-duty employment." The officers, under circumstances yet to be fully explained, resigned from the APD on March 26.

In mid-March, sources were also telling the Chronicle that a supervisor in the homeland defense unit (presumably Hinkle) had discovered a string of disturbing discrepancies in the time sheets and off-duty logs filed by Simank and Miller. Since June 2003, sources alleged, Simank and Miller had been "double-dipping" – reporting that they were on duty, working for the city, while simultaneously racking up hours working for Signature Science LLC, a security company where the two officers worked an off-duty job. At times, several sources independently alleged, between the two jobs, the officers reported working in excess of 24 hours a day.

At press time, Miller was in Afghanistan and unavailable for comment, but Simank denied any knowledge of the allegations. "I have no idea about that," he said. "We left [APD] for other reasons and our business [with Signature Science] was doing really well."

On March 26, a week after Hinkle's offense report, the two officers resigned from the department without other administrative action. Sources told the Chronicle that the alleged scam went either unnoticed or unremarked on by higher-ups – including former Cmdr. Joe Putman, who was head of homeland defense until late last year when he retired, and former Assistant Chief Jimmy Chapman, who, until he retired at the end of 2003, was the administrator in charge of overseeing homeland defense. According to APD spokesman Kevin Buchman, the department is currently investigating the allegations and "can not discuss the details of this case."
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Premium Training
Indeed, however clouded the departures of Simank, Miller, and Chapman from their official positions at APD, they seem to have landed on their feet at Signature Science, in positions that appear remarkably similar to those they left. And in the new era of homeland security, both the company and the officers have established profitable relationships with their former city employers – performing "training" functions that were formerly in-house at APD.
Signature Science is the for-profit arm of the nonprofit "applied research and development organization" Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. According to their Web site, SwRI specializes in the "creation and transfer of technology in engineering and the physical sciences" – research and development that in recent years has focused on technology to combat terrorism. In FY 2002 the company's revenues reached $339 million, 58% of that from government contracts – and a healthy dose of "classified" projects. (For example, for several years SwRI has had a Department of Defense contract to test the effectiveness of training honeybees, moths, and rats to "sniff out" explosives, the San Antonio Express-News reported last September.)

Austin-based Signature Science joined SwRI in 2001 as a "multi-disciplinary professional services company" providing, as a "cornerstone" of its services, "scientific services and products" for use by law enforcement "in the battle against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction," according to the company's Web site. Among those services are classes for local and federal law enforcement – including the FBI – about "weapons production, processes, terrorist scenarios and evidence preservation and recovery," the Express-News reported last fall. Last year, the company teamed up with APD to create a radiation-detection system for use with police dogs; also last year, the company sent six people to Iraq – including the two former APD HDU officers – to aid in the hunt for WMD.

The APD has had a close relationship with Signature Science since late 2001, when the department first entered into a contract with the company to provide officers with chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear awareness training – a WMD training class designed for first responders. Since December 2001, the city has paid the company at least $39,000 for these training sessions – even though extensive WMD training is available for free through the federal government's Office of Domestic Preparedness. The ODP runs the federal training programs through a "consortium" of entities – including the Texas Engineering Extension Service at Texas A&M – and has been funded by congressional appropriations since 1998, said Bill May, associate director of operations for the TEEX program and special assistant to the director of ODP. The goal of the federal program is to "maintain quality" in training and to assure accessibility to classes, in part by offering the trainings for free – including all course costs, roundtrip travel, lodging, and meals for each participant, he said.

Local agencies – like APD – may instead choose to use a portion of their homeland defense grant money to contract with a private company for similar training, May said. However, in that case, course curriculum must be submitted to ODP for approval before the expenditure is allowed. May said he could not recall Signature Science ever submitting curriculum for approval.
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Circular Exemption
Of course, the approval process isn't necessary if an individual department – like APD – wants to spend general budget revenue and not federal grants on private training – as APD did, compensating the company with funds from the department's general revenues.
In the interest of providing Austin residents "with the best and most advanced trained officers in the country," APD has availed itself of federal training, Buchman wrote in response to questions submitted by the Chronicle – but he did not provide specific information concerning any federal training.

The APD was "made aware" of Signature Science after the department began "searching for an organization that was familiar with" WMD, Buchman wrote. The company has a "national reputation for their expertise" in WMD, and due to their "local tie to Austin, the [APD] felt it would allow for faster training" of officers. The APD "has and will continue to maintain a professional relationship with Signature Science," Buchman wrote, "as long as threats of terrorism continue."

According to several current APD officers, the Signature Science classes they attended were taught in part by the two former APD HDU officers at the center of the current investigation, Simank and Miller. Oversight of Signature Science's law enforcement training programs now belongs to retired APD Assistant Chief Chapman. Chapman is under contract to run a "training program that teaches law enforcement personnel how to fight the proliferation of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction," the Austin Police Association newsletter The Police Line reported earlier this year – a job that the Line reported he was "uniquely qualified" for, given his supervisory experience of APD's homeland defense unit. According to a company spokesperson, since resigning on March 26, Simank and Miller have also taken full-time positions with Signature Science.

On March 29, the Chronicle filed an open-records request with the APD, seeking time sheets and off-duty logs for four officers. The city promptly handed over the documents for two of those officers, but claimed that the same documents relating to the other two officers – Simank and Miller – are exempt from public disclosure because they "deal with the detection, investigation, or prosecution" of a crime, and are "internal records ... maintained for internal use in matters relating to law enforcement." The city asked Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's open-records division for a ruling. Last month the AG ruled that the city may withhold the documents: "We conclude that the release of the responsive information would interfere with the detection, investigation, or prosecution of crime," Assistant Attorney General W. David Floyd wrote in a June 15 letter.

The Chronicle has appealed that decision to district court; a hearing on the matter is scheduled for July 22.
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An Underground Effort to Recall APA's Sheffield
By Jordan Smith

Last month, copies of a yellow trifold brochure proclaiming, "It's YOUR Association: Take Charge and Demand CHANGE," began circulating among the membership of the Austin Police Association. According to the brochure – unsigned, but apparently produced and/or supported by "former and current members" of the APA's board of directors – union members have been hosed by three-term President Mike Sheffield. And now, a band of officers has taken to the streets, aiming to collect signatures from 25% of the union membership in order to force a general recall election.

At press time, it was unclear whether the recallers have obtained enough signatures. But even if the petition drive is successful, it is even less clear whether the recall question will ever be put before the entire union. The APA's bylaws governing recall procedures are vague and conflicting – so much so that it's uncertain whether the recall provisions are even enforceable. Before recalling Sheffield, the union may first have to recall its bylaws – or, potentially, take the ouster effort to district court.

In general, the brochure paints Sheffield as a poor communicator who lacks integrity and has failed to "support" the union's members. Some of the allegations leveled at Sheffield are somewhat addled – for example, the brochure suggests that Sheffield was derelict by not "warning" or "preparing" the membership in advance of the Statesman's dismal four-part series on police use-of-force, even though Sheffield supposedly knew of its impending publication. (Of course, without knowing the content of the series beforehand – a practice we assume the Statesman does not engage in, despite the public outing earlier this year of editorialist Arnold Garcia's alleged reportorial quid pro quo with Mayor Will Wynn – it's hard to imagine what kind of warning Sheffield might have offered.) Under a section titled "lack of integrity," Sheffield is charged with reporting APA Secretary Sgt. Jason Dusterhoft to APD's Chief of Staff Rick Coy for "inappropriately" using his city e-mail account to send other officers a story from the AustinPoliceNews.com Web site, challenging the veracity of former Assistant Chief Jimmy Chapman and others on the Fifth Floor. According to the brochure, Coy subsequently opened a "major investigation" of the incident. The e-mail affair likewise made it into the pages of the Statesman, which, the brochure charges, "damaged" Dusterhoft's reputation.

Dusterhoft could not be reached for comment, but Sheffield said the brochure's account of the incident leaves out several important points. The union's labor contract forbids APA members from using city e-mail accounts to conduct union business, he said, and three board members brought copies of the Dusterhoft e-mail to Sheffield, concerned that the cop-shop brass would view the e-mail as official union business. "I told [Coy] that the APA is in no way responsible for this since we'd already been told not to use city computers for APA business," he said, "and since we'd already been threatened more than once by Assistant Chief Chapman that he was going to sue all the people spreading lies about him." (According to Sheffield, Chapman made that threat in mid-2001, shortly after Sheffield called for an independent investigation into the infamous mid-Nineties drug trafficking investigation code-named Mala Sangre.)

Moreover, Sheffield said, Dusterhoft isn't the only board member who has received an official knuckle-rapping for similar misuse of city e-mail. Indeed, APA Vice-President Wuthipong "Tank" Tantaksinanukij received a reprimand after using city e-mail to forward a Chronicle article to other cops. "The point is that these were not APA-sanctioned things," Sheffield said.

Whether the allegations have merit may take a back seat to whether the APA's bylaws actually contain a viable provision for conducting a recall election. At issue are two sections – Article IV, Sections 24 and 25 – which, theoretically, outline all the recall rules. Section 24 calls for any recall effort to be vetted and approved by the union's board, and provides a protocol for the general recall election, while Section 25 provides for a member-driven petition effort, with no mention of the board or any election protocols. Nowhere do the bylaws mention whether the two provisions are simultaneous or independent.

The way Sheffield and his supporters read it, whether initiated by petition or by the board, any recall effort must first comply with Section 24 before an election can be called. Without the benefit of specific charges vetted by elected representatives, Sheffield said, a recall effort could be used as retaliation – the same kind of behavior that the union opposes in the workplace. Others close to the effort disagree. Under an alternate interpretation of the bylaws – apparently the interpretation at play in the current recall attempt – Section 25 is meant to stand alone, and is a way to take the question directly to the general membership.

APA General Counsel Tom Stribling declined to comment for this story – understandable since he is, at least for now, in the unfortunate position of having to advise union members on both sides of the effort. Still, there are obvious problems with each interpretation. Under Section 24's requirement that the APA board itself vote to approve a recall election, Section 25's populist petition provisions become superfluous. But if Section 25 is meant to be completely independent from Section 24, then it borders on unenforceable, since it doesn't contain rules regarding how and when an election would be called.

This isn't the first recall effort aimed at ousting Sheffield. In April 2001 (coincidentally also right after the city and union signed off on a new labor contract), Officer Sam Bryson charged Sheffield with "willful neglect of office" for failing to consult APA membership before sitting on the city's Police Oversight Focus Group – the panel that ushered in the current era of civilian oversight. Bryson's challenge failed, with just three board members in support – the same number that voted to support this year's recall drive. But, Sheffield said, at least during the 2001 go-round, everyone knew who was unhappy and why, which in his view is not the case this time. "Attempts have been made by several board members who've asked the questions, who wrote this [brochure], who produced it, who is the author of the recall? And [they] were met with absolute silence," Sheffield said, "which I think speaks volumes about the veracity of the contents, when no one wants to take any responsibility for it."
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North Central Blues
APD's 'Magnificent 7' bring community policing to the North Central Command
BY JORDAN SMITH

photo by Jana Birchum

A short line of duplexes and fourplexes, each in various states of disrepair, lines John Nance Garner Circle, a cul de sac just west of I-35 that caps the north end of Sam Rayburn Drive between Highway 183 and Rundberg. Behind one of the sun-bleached wood fences that hide the small dwellings from the trash-strewn street, chickens cluck out a cacophonous song, and a small shaggy dog crosses the street to retrieve a rib bone from behind an abandoned armchair. The eastern flank of the circle dead-ends at a vast, overgrown vacant lot that has become the neighborhood dump. Hundreds of beer bottles litter the dense weeds, on a carpet of glass shards and bottle caps, rusty car parts, broken and rotting wooden chairs, random boots and sneakers, plastic bottles, and a moldy pile of carpet and cushions. A pungent odor rises and floats down the street.

Backing up to the dump is a white apartment building wearing layers of graffiti that someone has tried to wash away more than once. Two rows of apartments surround a concrete courtyard, where a small boy is playing with a twisted and rusting metal coat hanger and a piece of plastic. A young woman sitting on a bucket outside one of the first-floor apartments watches him as he wanders the courtyard with his makeshift toys. She's seen the trash, but she doesn't live here, she says. She and her son are here from Brownsville, visiting her mother-in-law.

"I know it's a bad neighborhood," she says, and nods toward her son. "I only let him play right here." back to top

APD's 'Magnificent 7'

Clockwise from top left: Officer James Hellums, Officer Gizette Gaslin, Officer Dale Cooper, Officer Hank Moreno, Cmdr. Robert Gross, Lt. Randy Pasley, Sgt. Will Beechinor

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Officer James Hellums
13-year APD officer
Hellums, the NC7's strategist, has spent a majority of his career patrolling the neighborhoods of North Central, beginning when they were part of the Northwest Area Command.

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Officer Gizette Gaslin
eight-year APD officer
Beechinor chose Gaslin, a self-described "people person" for the NCDR team because of her energy, enthusiasm, and determination.

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Officer Dale Cooper
18-year APD officer
Cooper, the APD's most veteran community policing officer, has been working the DR beat since 1992, before the current DR system was implemented and the job was referred to as "community liaison officer."

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Officer Hank Moreno
five-year APD officer
Moreno, who spent 10 years with the San Antonio Park Police before joining APD, enjoys working with the immigrant community to build trust among the community and police. Many of the immigrants come from countries where police corruption is the norm.

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Cmdr. Robert Gross
29-year APD officer
Gross agreed to head the NCAC on condition that he and his command staff be allowed to handpick their officers – without that ability, he told Chief Stan Knee, the new command would fail.

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Lt. Randy Pasley
221/2-year APD officer
NC neighbors praise Pasley, who created the ORH template, for his efforts at opening communication between NC residents and police – "He actually listens," says Brownie neighbor Gloria Garcia.

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Sgt. Will Beechinor
22-year APD officer
Beechinor (who pulls double-duty within the NC, supervising the DRs and the command detectives) used to live on Galewood Drive, one of the neighborhoods now on the ORH cleanup list. It was a great place to live, he said, and can be again.

Operation Restore Hope
BY JORDAN SMITH

North Central Area Command (shaded area)

Last spring, 29-year APD veteran Cmdr. Robert Gross and his three lieutenants were hard at work creating their new command. The 12.69-square-mile area stretches from I-35 west to the MoPac rail line, and from Anderson Lane north to Walnut Creek. It was carved from the existing Northwest and Northeast Area Commands in an effort to reduce police response times and to ease the call load for the officers working there, who were spending an inordinate amount of time responding to calls in the north central neighborhoods – especially in hot spots like the Rundberg Lane corridor, where drug-dealing and prostitution had become commonplace.

The idea behind the new, smaller command (as with its counterpart, the South Central Area Command, centered on Riverside and Congress) was to encircle the high call areas and saturate them with a dedicated group of officers in the hope that the added attention would help reduce crime. "We have a significantly different population to other areas in the city," said Gross. There is a large immigrant community, "like Ellis Island, Texas style. And we have an extremely high family violence rate, assaults, a high robbery rate – primarily of the immigrant community – a high burglary rate, and large open-air narcotics markets and prostitution around the I-35/Rundberg area." The area's problems are not much different than those in the rest of the city, Gross points out, but "the reality is that the problems are more concentrated."

This was a chance, they knew, to do something different – to apply what they'd learned from their experiences in the police department, to analyze their area, and to chart a new course of action. Traversing the North Central neighborhoods, Gross, Lt. Randy Pasley (who oversees all of the North Central community-policing activities), and Sgt. Will Beechinor (who supervises the four district representatives), were acutely aware that traditional law enforcement alone wouldn't make North Central a healthier place. "The biggest thing [we] were seeing was distressed neighborhoods," said Beechinor.

Among more established and more affluent neighborhoods were pockets of blight – marked by enormous amounts of trash, junked vehicles, and swaths of deteriorating rental properties, among other things. "[T]raditional means of law enforcement wouldn't work, because they had not worked," said Pasley. "The proof was in the pudding – a bad location left to its own devices that just got worse. So we had to do something innovative. How do we undo what took decades to make?" he asks. "[W]e knew this wouldn't be a quick fix to correct what is going on out there."

But they were determined, and had assembled an experienced team. Gross agreed to head up the new NCAC on the condition that he could handpick all of the officers. For the community policing team Gross tapped Pasley and then Beechinor who, in turn, recruited the best district reps he could find: Hellums (the strategist), Gizette Gaslin (the go-getter), Hank Moreno (the bilingual, immigrant-community specialist), and Dale Cooper (aka Mr. DR, the APD's most veteran community policing officer). "Throw a problem at them and they're all on top of it," the 22-year veteran officer said. And with that, their team – the North Central Seven – was formed.

It was up to Pasley to formulate a plan. He began research in earnest and quickly found that even among the vast resources available to police through the federal government, there weren't any step-by-step how-to plans for what they wanted to do. "So we decided to do our own 'Distressed Neighborhood Plan,'" said Pasley, "which became Operation Restore Hope." back to top


Oversight, Out of Mind
As the city and police union move forward, what's been left behind?
BY MIKE CLARK-MADISON


illustration by Doug Potter

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to the new "meet and confer" agreement between the city and the Austin Police Association. People got shot and died, racial strife ensued, City Hall's always fitful forward motion ground to a complete halt, and the city and the police union went briefly to war. Now, at the 11th hour, the City Council and APA membership are voting on a proposed contract that leaders on both sides say responds to the new APD reality and helps move Austin forward – even as advocates for police accountability charge that the public is being left behind.

The City Council will vote – perhaps on consent – today (Thursday) to approve the new agreement; the APA membership will wrap up its voting on March 23, two days before the expiration of the current agreement. So after more than a year at the negotiating table, and only a month after the APA walked away from talks in the wake of the civic crisis created by the Statesman, suddenly everyone is in a great big hurry. Which is never a good thing when dealing with a civic issue of this complexity, but it's probably too late to lay blame now.

A year ago, when the city and APA first began talks on a new five-year contract, the biggest concern on the city's side was money. "We were interested," says City Manager Toby Futrell, "in managing the cost drivers in our budgets," of which the generous salaries of Austin police officers are perhaps the most significant. Since the City Council and the APA both agreed, at least publicly and in principle, to Futrell's 2% "public safety premium" – a bonus above the raises, if any, granted to other city employees – back in August when the budget was adopted, the city's job was largely done months ago, or so it thought.

But as the fallout from the Sophia King and Jessie Owens shootings broadsided City Hall, "a lot of things happened and our original objectives were revised," Futrell says. "We decided to seek enhancements on oversight and on tenure on patrol" – allocating some of the limited new money on the table to rewarding longevity, a response to public concerns about too many unseasoned officers being sent too often into situations too difficult for them to handle, embodied in the public's mind in the person of Officer Scott Glasgow. "There were some lessons learned, and we went in to try to acknowledge and fix those things," Futrell says.

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Monitoring the Monitor
For the union, citizen oversight of APD – the marquee item in the last contract – was already something that needed to be fixed. "The officers are looking for some sign that we've depoliticized the process and made it fair for both the officers and the community," says APA President Mike Sheffield. "And I think we've done that, balancing the need for the community to feel that the department is doing what we should be doing, while protecting the rights of officers."
Of course, one can't really "depoliticize" a process that exists for political reasons. In its brief history, the city's Office of the Police Monitor and its Citizen Review Panel have been used – partly on their own initiative, partly by the designs of others – as the venue through which the public's anger at seemingly egregious APD abuses, real or imagined, can be channeled. Whatever the OPM and panel's actual powers to respond to those abuses, they have demonstrated a sense of obligation, or entitlement, to respond to the anger.

Throughout six years of discussion of police oversight, APD, City Hall, and the APA have asserted that the OPM and panel can and should have a less volatile role, as a quality-assurance system that makes recommendations on policies and procedures and basically stays out of the public's eye and APD's face. But nobody in Austin would care about citizen oversight, let alone be satisfied with it, if it only existed for that purpose, if a below-the-radar role was the best we could do.

Hence Futrell's "revised objectives," aimed, in her view, at giving the OPM and panel more power to do what the citizens expect an "oversight" process to do, without thus provoking inevitable conflict with the APA, as happened in both the King and Owens cases. "It's definitely an improvement over what we had before," she says. "We went back in to repair, and in so doing enhance, things that came up when we first came down the chute."

These "enhancements" include some obvious, though carefully limited, authority for the OPM and panel to actually talk about the actions they decide to take. "The panel can give its public explanation as it moves through benchmarks in the process," Futrell says, noting that – as demonstrated in the King case – the current system's vagaries and enforced silences create frustrations for officers as well as citizens.
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Beyond Good and Evil?
But the oversight process remains, in the new contract, carefully prescribed and regulated – the effective result of "depoliticizing" the work of the OPM and panel – in ways that community advocates, particularly at the ACLU (which has taken the lead role for years in the effort to bring oversight to APD), feel make the new contract's oversight provisions worse than nothing at all. "The citizens have no greater rights under this process than they do under state civil-service law," says Ann del Llano of the ACLU Police Accountability Project. (Meet-and-confer allows Austin to supersede the provisions of Chapter 143 of the Local Government Code, the state civil-service law that would otherwise apply.)
"But the officer now has far more rights to gain information about citizens and complainants. And there are more loopholes now so that the officer can never be disciplined. It's really shocking and terrifying. This evil, anti-citizen process will be in place for five years. We'll keep working at the Legislature" – where a bill to require police oversight statewide, drafted by the ACLU, died last session – "but the city of Austin has sold us – the citizens – out for now. I wish I knew what to do about it."

Whether you agree with her assessment of the result, Del Llano is probably right that the city has chosen to accept the limitations of APD's oversight process. Despite the APA's constant assertions that officers' rights guaranteed under state law require that the OPM and panel have limited powers, those state-law requirements, in Chapter 143, do not apply to "more than 90% of the police agencies in this state," del Llano notes. Yet the City Council appears in no hurry to try to make Austin part of that majority.

The simple, and bitter, explanation heard often from APD detractors is that "Mayor Sheffield" – in del Llano's words – runs City Hall. Certainly, the union is an interest group both loved and feared at Eighth and Colorado, but even were it not, meaningful oversight would still be a slippery beast to snare. As long as the community cannot agree on how it feels about APD's intrinsic heroism or villainy – whether the cops, by definition, are to be loved or feared – one constituency or another will always be dissatisfied with the powers or the performance of the OPM and its panel.

More salient, right now, is the perceived mandate for "healing" the frayed relationships among APD, the citizenry, the rank-and-file officers, City Hall, the Statesman, and whomever else. This project has added a lot of items to Toby Futrell's to-do list – more so than to Mike Sheffield's – of which meet-and-confer is but one. In that context, the benefit of getting the contract out of the way, in a manner pleasing to the union, could plausibly be seen as outweighing the benefits of a stricter oversight process. We'll have five years to find out. back to top

Anatomy of a Shooting
Report on Owens incident leaves questions about the limits of APD policy
BY JORDAN SMITH

On Feb. 20, the city made public the Austin Police Department's Internal Affairs investigation report into the June 14 police shooting death of Jessie Lee Owens. The results of that investigation provided the groundwork for the 90-day suspension Knee imposed upon Officer Scott Glasgow earlier this month. While the report answers many questions about what happened that night on Tillery Street, it leaves open the question of whether Glasgow actually violated any departmental policies that evening – including the two policy violations for which, in theory, he was suspended.

According to the report, at 1:27am on June 14, Glasgow's voice was calm and steady as he radioed the police dispatcher to say that he had observed and was following a stolen car that was the subject of a "be on the lookout" advisory issued earlier that evening. As it turned out, 20-year-old Jessie Lee Owens was behind the wheel of the BOLO'd Dodge Neon. Glasgow radioed for backup and began following the car, but before his backup (coming from Seventh and Navasota) could arrive, Owens turned off Airport Boulevard onto 14th Street and again, northbound, onto Tillery where he began slowing down, creeping up the street at between five and 10 mph. According to transcripts from IA interviews with Glasgow, from experience he judged what Owens' actions meant: that he was getting ready to bail out of the car and flee on foot, a situation Glasgow considered no less risky than if Owens were to speed away in the car (regardless of whether Glasgow took up chase).

Owens pulled over, and Glasgow pulled up to the left of the Neon, stopping his patrol car so that its right front quarter panel was about three feet from the middle of the Neon's driver-side door – to prevent the driver from easily fleeing on foot. Glasgow got out of his car, pistol drawn, and called the dispatcher: "One at gunpoint," he said calmly; it was 1:28am. One minute later the calm was shattered: "Shot," Glasgow said into his radio, his voice high-pitched and winded; then: "shots fired."

"[W]ho shot their weapon, you or the suspect?" asks the dispatcher.

"I did, it's in the car with him," Glasgow answered. "He drug me down the street."
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"I Thought I Was Gonna Die"
Within just a single minute, the Owens stop had gone tragically awry. Getting out of his car, Glasgow had yelled to Owens, ordering him to put his hands up. "[H]e finally complied and put his hands up," Glasgow told IA detectives during a Nov. 18 interview. "I could tell he didn't have anything in his hands. So, I went up to the ... driver's door of the car and I tried to open it with my left hand but it was locked. I ordered the driver several times to open the door and he finally did," he continued.
But as the door opened, it hit the patrol car's bumper, Glasgow told investigators. He ordered Owens to put his hands up, outside the car, which Owens did. However, he said, after repeated orders, Owens refused to get out of the car. "[H]e was looking around all the place like people do when ... they're going to run and ... he kept acting like that," he said. "He was acting nervous."

Worried that Owens would try to flee on foot or would try to speed away in the Neon, Glasgow said that he felt his "only option" was to try to "immobilize" Owens, eliminating his ability to flee or, worse, to reach for an unseen weapon. But Owens pulled away, drawing his hand back inside the car. "[H]e was pulling his hand away from me so I couldn't ... try to control him," he said.

Glasgow tried to secure his "hinge cuffs" on Owens' wrist, to gain some leverage. It didn't work. Instead, as Owens pulled back, Glasgow's arms went with him, his gun still drawn and in his right hand. "I don't know how my right arm got in the car," he said, "but I remember as he went back in, all of a sudden the door slammed on both of my arms and I was ... pinned in between the top of the door and the ... roof ... and I couldn't get out." Looking down through the window, he saw Owens' left hand on the door handle, holding the door closed.

"I remember hearing the gear shift go into drive," he said. "I could hear the gas when ... the car began to accelerate. I remember trying to ... run with the car ... and then he just accelerated and I lost my footing and I started getting dragged," he continued. "He wouldn't let go of the car door. I didn't have any choice. I thought I was gonna die. That's when I fired my weapon."

According to an accident reconstruction recreated by APD crime scene investigators, Owens accelerated up to 25 mph, dragging Glasgow 40 feet before Glasgow fired his weapon. After Glasgow fell free from the car, landing on his back in the middle of the street, the Neon continued forward, striking the back of an unoccupied SUV before smashing into a chain-link fence. Owens had been shot five times, and although he still had a pulse when EMS arrived, resuscitation efforts failed and he was pronounced dead at 1:44am.
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High Risks
The shooting sparked a political firestorm and has rekindled perennial questions about APD Chief Stan Knee's ability to police his officers. A Travis Co. grand jury returned an indictment of Glasgow for criminally negligent homicide, but that was later tossed out of court without objection from District Attorney Ronnie Earle. The formal APD investigation of the shooting did, however, lead to a 90-day unpaid suspension for Glasgow, imposed by Knee on Feb. 9 – a penalty sharply criticized as too lenient by Owens' family. On the other hand, many officers considered the suspension (for two policy violations and not for the actual shooting, which was deemed necessary and within policy) proof that Knee is compromised by a need to appease, and is incapable of supporting the sometimes controversial, but ultimately appropriate, actions of his officers.
In a disciplinary memo, Knee wrote that Glasgow deviated from departmental policy governing so-called "high-risk traffic stops" and that he failed to exercise "good judgment" while attempting to apprehend Owens – in violation of a vague clause in the "statement of purpose" of the department's community-policing standard operating procedures. In the course of their investigation, IA detectives interviewed numerous officers – among them, officers who responded to the scene on June 14 as well as field training officers with whom Glasgow rode during his probationary period – in an apparent attempt to determine whether Glasgow's actions had violated high-risk stop procedures and violated common sense.

According to APD high-risk-stop policy, officers are advised to make contact with dispatch, select a stop location, signal the suspect to pull over, make the stop, "take command" of the situation, wait for backup, remove suspects from the vehicle, and clear the vehicle. While the policy makes no mention of positioning, Glasgow and the other officers IA interviewed said that, under ideal circumstances, at least two officers would respond to the call and would position themselves behind the suspect vehicle, before activating their lights and taking "cover" behind the engine block and issuing commands to the suspect – as they had been taught in the academy. On paper then, Glasgow had, technically, "violated" policy and training.
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Common Sense and Catastrophe
None of the officers interviewed said they were taught other techniques at the academy – although a detailed memo outlining the four-hour training Glasgow received while a cadet, mentioned several times in the IA file, is conspicuously missing from the released documents (the city has appealed the memo's release to the attorney general). Nevertheless, several officers told investigators they had in fact used one or more of the techniques Glasgow had employed, and many said they could understand why Glasgow acted the way he did.
"[L]et's say you give ... verbal commands [to a suspect] to put his hands up and he does," IA Detective Felicia Williams proposed during an interview with Officer Jeremy Benoit. "But when you ask him to step out of the car he doesn't, but he keeps his hands up. What do you do?" The officer is alone, she says, but backup is on the way.

"[S]ince his hands are up and I can see them, I would probably approach the vehicle and try to get him out," Benoit answers. Just standing there and waiting offers the suspect an opportunity to plan a getaway – a judgment offered by at least four other officers.

While none of the officers said they received academy training in any "car blocking" techniques like the one Glasgow used, several said they'd used the technique. According to 10-year veteran Philip Shingleton, he learned car blocking in the Army and used the technique on occasion while working patrol in East Austin. In just under six years on patrol, Shingleton logged more than 600 stolen vehicle stops and arrests, he told IA – a record that earned him a commendation from an auto insurance industry trade group. In most of those stops, he said, the suspect pulled over and stopped without prompting – a scenario similar to Glasgow's and one not contemplated by APD's policy, but one that eliminates an officer's ability to choose a stop location and initiate the actual stop. While many of the officers agreed that they might not proceed the way Glasgow had, they were hesitant to second-guess his actions. "[I]t's a tough situation to put yourself in," Shingleton said, "but I mean, you find yourself in those situations as a cop sometimes."

Glasgow's attorney Travis Williamson says the need for officers to use their own judgment, based on experience, is exactly the point. Knee's decision to discipline Glasgow for violating a general procedure, Williamson believes, negates an officer's ability to adapt to unpredictable situations and sets a dangerous precedent. "So forget about how experienced you are or how seasoned you are," he said. "It's all simply going back to your training at the academy."

Williamson said that Glasgow cannot comment on his case right now; however, on Feb. 21, in accordance with civil service law, Glasgow submitted a written response to his temporary suspension that has been placed in his personnel file. "The inherent nature of ... law enforcement ... feeds on unpredictable situations, which precludes any attempt to author a procedural catalogue that would be all-inclusive in scope," Glasgow wrote. "What was 'common sense' in one moment can degenerate in microseconds. That does not mean the 'common sense' thing done is suddenly nonsense," he continued. "[T]he acts of others can make even the best intended actions evolve into a catastrophe." back to top

Unequal Farce
The 'Statesman' Leaps to Its Own Defense ... and Crashes on Takeoff
BY MICHAEL KING

Mike Clark-Madison is fully occupied elsewhere this week – see "Facing the South," p.28 – and he was kind enough to share this space, in order to follow a continuing city story. (Kindly address this week's angry letters to me.)

But before we take off the gloves again – first, an apology to our readers.

We screwed up, badly, when we reported last week that as part of its "Unequal Force" series, Jan. 25-28, the Austin American-Statesman had published mug shots of the 10 Austin police officers who have filed the most "Use of Force Reports." In singling out those 10 officers in its Jan. 27 segment, the daily published brief career summaries of each officer, but it did not publish their photos (except, on a different day, one of Detective Michael Olsen and of Officer Scott Glasgow). After staff writer Jordan Smith made the initial error (apparently picked up from e-mail broadsides, and overlooked by two editors), we compounded that mistake by repeating it in Editor Louis Black's quotation of the Smith passage in "Page Two." It was a foolish (and unfortunately repeated) mistake, and on Sunday the Statesman beat us up a couple of times for it – beatings we fully deserved.

We apologize to our readers – and to the editors, reporters, and staff of the Statesman – for that mistake in our report. When it was first pointed out to us last week by Statesman Managing Editor Fred Zipp, we corrected it on our Web site, again in the "Oops!" column today, and we hope this week's restatement helps to mitigate any future misrepresentation or confusion about that detail of the Statesman's coverage. We were wrong, it was nobody's fault but our own, and we apologize.

That said, however, the fact remains that the Statesman report has seriously misrepresented both the extent and implications of racial disparity in police uses of force – and that misrepresentation needs to be understood if the larger issues clumsily reflected in the current community screaming match are to be adequately addressed. It won't be addressed by mistaking the trees – the cops on the beat – for the forest: the institutional and political culture within which police officers (and indeed all of us) work. Our political institutions, top to bottom, are increasingly making street cops the first resort for virtually every social problem facing the city – from traffic gridlock to family welfare to substance abuse to emergency mental health – and then blaming the cops when the problem explodes in their faces. That's not right, that's not fair – and that does not address the real problems.

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Painting by Numbers
So we do not apologize for publishing a strongly skeptical analysis of the Statesman series, and for strongly questioning its principal conclusion – repeated relentlessly since Jan. 25 – that (to quote ad nauseam Editor Rich Oppel) "The series demonstrated that from 1998-2003, African Americans were 100 percent more likely to be met with force than were whites in contact with police, while Hispanics were 25 percent more likely than whites to be subjected to force." This stark and headline-generating conclusion is "demonstrated" only if one accepts the extremely dubious statistical presumptions submerged in that phrase "in contact with police" or the Statesman's common variation, "encounters with police." The daily insists on comparing unevenly self-reported uses of force by officers with the entire universe of any and all reported police contacts with Austin citizens, however innocuous (although as we see below, that too is subject to arbitrary adjustment). Using those "encounters" as its base number is the only way the paper can arrive at its "100 percent" (i.e., twice as likely) figure for African-Americans and "25 percent" (i.e., 1.25 times as likely) for Hispanics in being subjected to police force.
Stung by the public criticism, on Sunday Statesman reporter Andy Alford, who co-wrote the series, finally explained and defended the paper's methodology (as was never done during the series itself). Alford says the reporters rejected APD Chief Stan Knee's argument that the comparison should include traffic stops – somewhat mysteriously, since aren't these also very common "encounters with police"? – because of the incompleteness of the data (surely no worse than the incompleteness of APD's inconsistently maintained use-of-force reports). Then Alford adds the accurate – but in this context irrelevant – recent independent report showing racial disparities in traffic-stop consent searches. What's at issue in the Statesman series, presumably, is not searches but racially disparate uses of force. Secondly, Alford argues that since witnesses and bystanders were sometimes subject to force, analyzing force only in connection with arrests would have been too narrow a scope. But 90% of the use-of-force reports involve arrests, and even the paper's anecdotal exception – the apparent assault by Detective Michael Olsen on bystander/witness Jeffrey Thornton, now subject to a lawsuit – in fact ended in an arrest, so statistically, that stays in the box. As Jordan Smith reported last week – in the absence of better data that does not currently exist – the most accurate base comparison for uses of force is against numbers of arrests (even though both numbers are also subject to qualification).

Alford points out that the approaches suggested by APD "still show disparities in how the police use force among various ethnic groups." That is true – as confirmed in the Chronicle last week, in a straightforward comparison of uses of force in arrest situations, which can at least be assumed to be roughly comparable for statistical purposes. And those comparisons do in fact show there is a racial disparity in police uses of force, as we also reported – although nowhere near the melodramatic ratio insisted upon by the Statesman (and the use-of-force rate against Hispanics, at least in this limited context, appears to be lower than that against whites).

The real problem, for the Statesman, is that those comparisons do not show the radical degree of racial disparity that generates alarmist numbers like "African Americans are 100 percent more likely to be met with force," and sensational headlines like "Blacks bear the brunt when police use force." Even on the Statesman's own terms, the latter headline, which opened the series on Jan. 25, is so misleading as to be untrue – for in plain English it says that "On those occasions when police use force, African-Americans are treated worse." That may or may not be true, but the Statesman statistics and stories have nothing to say about it, one way or another. (A more accurate but equally uninformative headline might read, "Most drunks busted downtown are white.")

Despite the elaborately packaged, pseudo-scientific, Rube Goldberg contraption of the Statesman's analysis that spits out the same numbers, over and over, the actual situation (based on available, highly qualified information) appears to be much less inflammatory: when placed under arrest, blacks are subject to force about 20% more often than whites, and Hispanics about 15% less often. What those real disparities may mean is uncertain (and Alford's Sunday explanations suddenly introduce resisting-arrest figures that would require much closer scrutiny). But certainly those statistics do not suggest, as the Statesman series unfortunately implies, that a small number of cowboy cops, throughout the city but primarily based Downtown, is beating up African-American citizens at will.

This misleading slipperiness of the Statesman's approach to the data is highlighted when Alford returns to the question of the Downtown cops. The paper did note in passing that these officers "primarily worked at night and downtown," but that phrasing de-emphasizes the fact that all 10 officers were assigned to the Downtown Area Command, which regularly patrols Sixth Street. Alford acknowledges that the use-of-force reports of the 10 officers show that "52 percent of the subjects were white" (i.e., almost exactly the percentage of whites in Austin). Significantly, Alford doesn't then follow that figure with the expected percentages of force used against minorities – presumably because they are roughly proportionate to the Austin population breakdown. Instead, she immediately shifts statistical ground, once again, to a comparison against all "encounters" – enabling her to reproduce the paper's now-reflexive, misleading percentages: "during encounters ... downtown police officers in general were 110 percent more likely to use force against African Americans ... [and] 26 percent more likely to use force on Hispanics."

If the very uncertain "reported encounter" numbers suggest anything, it appears to be a much more insidious but also much less sensational form of institutional racism. White people generally "encounter" police officers more often in friendly or nonthreatening situations, and too often cannot comprehend why minority citizens – from long experience – might view police with suspicion or even hostility. But that is not the same thing as "demonstrating" that Austin cops are using force on minority residents at a radically disproportionate level, as the Statesman continues to insist, but the available statistics simply do not show.

We repeat. "Use-of-force" numbers and "encounter" numbers are not readily comparable without significant adjustment, and abruptly sliding the latter into a discussion of the former is seriously misleading. It is also simply unfair to the officers who filled out the use-of-force reports in good faith that they wouldn't be used as self-justifying bludgeons against the officers involved. (That's not in any way to excuse Detective Olsen, who apparently not only physically abused a bystander but then lied about it to his superiors.) So while it's true that the Statesman didn't publish mug shots of the 10 officers, it did single them out in a statistical lineup for particular identification as suspect cops, based on an analysis that, in this form, simply doesn't sustain such a damning suspicion.

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Oppel-Inania, Yet Again
In most circumstances, the Statesman normally bites its swollen tongue rather than condescend to mention the Chronicle, so we're rather amused that we've gotten the recently semiretired Rich Oppel off his complacent duff, huffing and puffing at our impudence and working for a living again (at least this week). Oppel was in high dudgeon about our "mug shots" mistake, and as embarrassed as we are to admit it, he's got us on that one – though it changes not a whit the substance of our critique. It's even more amusing to find him just now discovering a "culture of secrecy" at the APD, because the brass apparently misled him about officers' willingness to speak to reporters. How shocking – although predictably, Oppel uses the administration's stonewalling as an excuse to take a gratuitous and undeserved swipe at "the police union, the Austin Police Association." (Official Austin's "veneer of liberalism," as the ever illiberal Oppel puts it, is never so transparent as on the subject of unions.) We invite him to look over Jordan Smith's ongoing Chronicle coverage of the APD's dismal "Mala Sangre" history – not a subject in which his paper has deigned to invest much serious labor. (Hint: It won't fit readily on a spreadsheet.) If he did so, maybe he wouldn't be so surprised at the Fifth Floor's traditions of omerta.
Oppel dismisses Smith's careful analysis of "Unequal Force," his latest application for a Pulitzer, claiming Smith made "errors of fact repeatedly." Other than the phantom mug shots – mea maxima culpa – he cites only one: We used a figure APD gave us of 553,194 total arrests in the nearly five-year period covered by the series. Oppel says that his figure, confirmed with the APD, is 265,579, and that the Statesman reported it (although despite considerable searching and a direct request to Oppel, we could find that number nowhere in the series, nor indeed in the last six months of Statesman coverage). We again contacted APD, and spokesman Kevin Buchman profusely apologized for the department's mistake in supplying to Smith the 553,194 total as "total arrests" – that number, he says, actually includes "total arrests plus charges." The total arrest figure is about half that number (and about 10% higher than the number Oppel cited). But that's OK; let's use the number Oppel "confirmed" with APD.

As anyone who hasn't fallen in love with Microsoft Excel should understand, it makes no difference. Since the demographic breakdown of those two gross numbers is approximately the same, the comparison of the relative arrest rate and use-of-force rate between ethnic groups is unchanged. The same applies to Oppel's claim that Smith's figure on use-of-force reports is "off 30 percent." Oppel didn't clarify, and instead referred our follow-up query to reporters Alford and Erik Rodriguez, who say Smith didn't give the correct time frame for the number of use-of-force reports she directly analyzed. Smith disagrees. (As Smith's story makes clear, she analyzed reports from about three years, and the Statesman reporters used about five.)

But we don't care to pursue this war of the dueling databases, because again, even if we presume that Alford and Rodriguez are correct, the time frame has no effect on the relative demographic numbers. As Smith had already reported last fall in relation to the Scott Glasgow/Jessie Owens case, the use-of-force reports may be helpful in analyzing individual incidents, but they are quite unreliable for reaching broad conclusions.

Despite Oppel's condescending mystification and the Statesman's insistence, this is not a dispute about numbers, but about the interpretation of the numbers. Alford and Rodriguez continue to believe, as they put it, "there's nothing random about the [use-of-force] rate we calculated. Rather, it's a calculation from documented [APD-reported] events, and it shows the likelihood of encountering force, broken down by race, in that universe of events." Unfortunately, that "universe of events" bears no real relationship to the use-of-force data, and the calculations – however accurately digitized -- that attempt to establish direct connections between them collapse of their own weight.

Or as Oppel himself might put it, "With erroneous building blocks such as that, all claims built upon them fail as well."

The Statesman's readers, the APD, and the entire city deserve an apology. We won't hold our breath.

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Page 2
BY LOUIS BLACK

"On Tuesday, Jan. 27, the paper [the Austin American-Statesman] ran an itemized list of the 10 officers who have filed the most use-of-force reports. The reporters listed each officer's name, the number of years on the force, and the total amount of training each has received, and acknowledged that most of the use-of-force incidents took place at night and Downtown. The paper did not, however, note that every one of the 10 officers is assigned to the DTAC – which just happens to patrol Sixth Street.*" This is just one point made by Jordan Smith in her response to the Statesman's four-part series on the Austin Police Department (The Figures Do Lie).
"Blacks bear the brunt when police use force," accused the headline on the front page of the Statesman's Jan. 25, 2004, Sunday paper, their most widely read of the week. The story offered that an exhaustive analysis of police department statistics found that "Austin police used force against African-Americans and Hispanics at significantly higher rates than they did against whites."

City leaders were quick to express their dismay at the conclusions reached; city minority community leaders pointed to them as proof of allegations they have been making for years. If accurate, these assertions would be very distressing. As Jordan Smith points out in this issue, however, they are woefully off-base, which is so much more than just distressing.

In that:

1) Our city leaders embraced the conclusions before fully examining them. 2) They indicate the Statesman's concentration on a few spectacular major stories a year (both to break major news and to win awards), at the cost of their regular reporting. 3) No matter how clearly wrong and specifically refuted they are shown to be, the assertions will remain in the community's mind as "truth." 4) Finally, though the Statesman's analysis of use of force is way off-target, there is an unhealthy, distrustful relationship between minorities and the police – but, tragically, this report will only make that situation worse.

Texas Monthly Publisher Mike Levy, never shy about criticizing the city, has led a citizen-based response to the Statesman, offering literally pounds of reasoned (and a few not so reasoned) responses from concerned citizens throughout the community. In defending the Statesman reports, Editor Rich Oppel said that the numbers don't lie. Actually, numbers rarely speak, but interpretations of numbers can shout from the rooftops. Given a body of statistics far less complex than the ones examined by the Statesman, reputable statisticians can reach contradictory conclusions. Analyzing bodies of data is not a simple task. The reliability and comprehensiveness of the data are the first concern. The questions asked can dictate the answers derived. If, still using their sadly flawed methodology, the Statesman had considered the same data but had looked at it in terms of individuals' economic classes and neighborhoods' economic profiles, would the analysis still have been so racially overdetermined? In deriving conclusions from data, there are many factors to be considered, most having some consequence. Numbers may not lie, but an analysis of them is not necessarily any kind of truth.

This column is not going to repeat Smith's detailed analysis of the Statesman team's failures. In fact, I'm going to keep this column extra short in hopes that you will quickly turn to Smith's piece and read it. City Editor Mike Clark-Madison and Smith do an outstanding job of considering the Statesman's reported findings, so go there now.

In general, I resist criticizing the Statesman in this column and urge the staff to do likewise, for a number of reasons. Obviously, they are a daily and we are a weekly, so our approaches to what we do are as different as, say, those of a neighborhood barbecue joint and a chain homestyle restaurant that serves thousands of meals daily. We have an inherently different conception of our responsibilities to the community. We are also in competition. Thus, cheap shots at the daily from this weekly read like self-congratulatory, shooting-fish-in-a-barrel laziness.

Yet as a reader, I find the daily disappointing. Despite the fact that it boasts a staff of excellent reporters, writers, and editors, its coverage often seems puzzlingly slight. Much is left out, and even what is published is often hard to follow. When Rich Oppel came on as editor, the paper improved dramatically at first, but lately seems to just keep getting worse. Offsetting the weak day-in, day-out coverage are the occasional, labor-intensive, heavily highlighted, usually multipart major exposés. Some of these are very good. Some, like the explosive Barton Springs story, are simply exploitive, with strong reporting twisted by alarmist headlines and undercut by gratuitous conclusions. Regardless, ongoing substantive coverage of the community appears to have taken a backseat to these star turns, designed to ignite community attention and win journalism awards. Is this really the Statesman's mission?

This latest story is an embarrassment. The Statesman has failed the community and its citizens. It has failed the police department. And there is no indication that this will lead to any self-examination or reassessment on the paper's part. Although almost all of their most spectacular assertions in the Barton Springs "exposé" turned out to be groundless, they never really acknowledged it. As in the current story, they took to task City Manager Toby Futrell and city staff (the soil- and water-testing folks). In both cases, at least some of those they've indicted were those working most intensely to solve the real problem. Yet, they never even tried to make it right to Futrell or city staff when their most virulent criticisms about Barton Springs Pool proved groundless.

Sadly, regardless of how legitimate the criticisms, corrections, and concerns, and no matter how faulty and ill-considered the conclusions, the Statesman's report will maintain credibility. This will negatively impact minority communities' perceptions of how they are treated and the police officers' feelings as to how fairly they are appraised. The long-term consequences are bad for our community, exacerbating rather than alleviating the problems and offering no real solutions, even more so because they are so dramatically misdirected. Don't expect the Statesman to address the problems created by the report, nor its weaknesses. They're probably thrilled at how much attention they've attracted, are busy clearing the shelf for those new awards, and seemingly not very concerned with the real-life consequences of their bad analysis and faulty reporting. At least they haven't shown signs of it yet.

If you're not upset yet, read Jordan Smith's article, and then revisit the Statesman's report, knowing the latter will reverberate far longer than the former.
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The Figures Do Lie
By JORDAN SMITH

'Statesman' finds headline cops-and-race story – except it just ain't so

On the public relations front, last week was a bad one for the Austin Police Department. In a four-day series, the Austin American-Statesman reported, stridently – as if Editor Rich Oppel had discovered Jimmy Hoffa's body buried beneath the department's Eighth Street headquarters – that, after a "comprehensive" analysis of police records, including a database with five years' worth of APD "use-of-force" reports, their reporters had found that Austin police used force against Austin's Hispanic and African-American residents "at significantly higher rates than they did against whites." According to the daily, Hispanics are 25% more likely to have force used against them, and African-Americans are 100% more likely to have force used against them, than are whites. These are inflammatory, even shocking, statistics. Unfortunately for the city, the APD, and most especially the Statesman, they appear to be dramatically exaggerated – indeed, almost entirely untrue.

The difference in treatment "defies easy explanation," wrote reporters Andy Alford and Erik Rodriguez. That's because the analytical methodology used by the paper defies logical explanation. To arrive at its conclusions, the paper compared two sets of data that bear little relation to one another, while ignoring the more obvious and accurate approach used by the city itself to analyze its own data. The Statesman team also failed to take the simple precaution of analyzing the use-of-force data against itself. And most importantly, the paper failed to recognize that the data in the use-of-force database is so inconsistent that it is effectively worthless for any broad conclusions.
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Apples vs. Oranges vs. APD
According to the Statesman's series, beginning Jan. 25 and titled "Unequal Force: A Four-Day Look at Police Violence," reporters analyzed 6,447 Use of Force Report forms – a form officers sometimes fill out when they use any form of force against a citizen, from activating a pressure point to firing a gun – completed by APD officers from Oct. 31, 1998, to May 11, 2003. Those reports related to 4,701 individual subjects and 4,280 individual incidents. (A single incident can involve multiple officers and subjects, with a report being generated for each.) The paper then compared this data against the total number of police contacts for each year. That latter number includes nearly every situation in which a citizen might encounter police – from flagging an officer down for help on the side of the road to being the subject of a felony arrest warrant.
In matching the two bodies of data against one another, the paper purports to have created a "rate of force – a precise measure of how likely a person who encountered police was to be met with force." Based on this model, the paper concluded that police used force 7.4 times per 1,000 contacts with black residents, who make up about 10% of Austin's population; 4.6 times per 1,000 contacts with Hispanic residents, who make up about 29% of the population; and 3.7 times per 1,000 contacts with white residents, who make up about 54% of the population.

These numbers are doubtlessly worrisome – or would be if they were true. But the comparison behind the daily's "rate of force" is fundamentally flawed. Nearly every Austinite has some occasion, often an innocent one, to make contact with the police during the course of a year. Very few Austinites, of any ethnicity, are the targets of police force, and they are not simply a random subset of the entire population of the city. The Statesman's "rate of force" suggests how likely it is that any random Austinite, under any random circumstance involving police contact, will be roughed up by the cops. This calculation might appeal to a paranoid actuary – or would, "all other things being equal," as the actuaries say. But all other things are not equal; the Statesman rate fails to accurately reflect the real circumstances under which a person is likely to be met with police force.
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– And Liars Figure
The APD began recording officer use of force in October 1998, as part of the department's bid for national accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies. The reports are designed to be an internal tracking tool, based on an underlying assumption that citizens are met with force almost exclusively while being arrested – an assumption borne out by the database. In November, in response to a request made under the state's open records laws, the Chronicle received a database of APD's use-of-force reports recorded from September 2000 through June 2003, which contained 5,555 total reports, reflecting 3,660 unique events and 4,154 unique individuals. Of the 5,555 reports, 4,911 – or 88% – related to incidents that ended in an arrest.

The high correlation between use of force and arrests makes comparing those two sets of data a better and more compelling indicator to reflect when, how, and against whom police actually use force. In fact, this is the manner in which the APD calculates its own "rate of force." According to department statistics, from Oct. 31, 1998, to May 11, 2003 – the time period covered by the Statesman's analysis – APD officers made 553,194 total arrests and officers filed 6,447 force reports. Broken down by race and then compared to the totals, whites accounted for 36.4% of all arrests and 35.3% of all use-of-force reports, Hispanics accounted for 37.1% of all arrests and 30.3% of all force reports, and blacks accounted for 26.2% of all arrests and 30.6% of all force reports. These reflect statistically significant differences between the races, but hardly "stunning" and "shocking" disparities. In other words, the likelihood that a suspect facing arrest will be met with force is roughly equal across racial lines.

What that correlation also shows, however, is that relatively speaking, blacks are far more likely to be arrested than are whites – a national phenomenon that prompts serious questions about social equity, which the entire community should address. "[Neither] Austin's police nor any other police agency in the United States can solve the root causes of crime in America," Austin Police Association President Mike Sheffield wrote in a press release responding to the Statesman report, "and until political leaders start adequately addressing issues such as access to education, decent jobs, housing, mental health care specifically and health care generally, there will ... continue to be 'two Americas.'"

The Statesman repeatedly lauded its own analysis of departmental data as "unique" and "comprehensive," while noting that APD Chief Stan Knee said, "[H]e would have analyzed use-of-force rates differently," and that outside experts concluded that the paper's methodology was "rare in its approach." Yet not once in four days did the daily explain how its methodology was different, nor did the reporters address the statistical chasm created by ignoring other data and relying only on their chosen method of analysis.

Unfortunately, thus far city leaders have also taken for granted that the Statesman's conclusions are correct without independently reviewing any of the readily available data. On Jan. 28, the final day of the series, the Statesman reported that as a result of its crack investigative journalism, Mayor Will Wynn is set to take action. "I would be surprised if any of these numbers are refuted – it's just too well done," he told the daily. "This is a classic example of why we have a free press in this country. This series is going to serve the community well, as painful as it might be for some folks."
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Sixth Street Crime Wave
The Statesman apparently chose not to delve too deeply into the more than six dozen different variables contained for each record within the use-of-force database. In a large graphic map of the city, the Statesman broke out its rate of "force per 1,000" residents for each police sector in the city. Not surprisingly, the resulting correlation reaffirms their hypothesis: According to the Statesman, in every sector of town, blacks are disproportionately likely to have police force used against them.

But where and how do Austin police actually use force? Apparently, the paper did not care to find out, although the question is easily answered by the database. In the three-year section analyzed by the Chronicle, persons against whom force is used are most likely to be white (34.7%), male (84.6%), and under 30 (45.7%); those people encounter police during a dispatched call for service – meaning after someone has called police for assistance (47.8%); and they encounter police in the Central West and Downtown area commands (37.4%). The Downtown Area Command was created, carved out of the Central West Area Command, in 2001. On Tuesday, Jan. 27, the paper ran an itemized list of the 10 officers who have filed the most use-of-force reports. The reporters listed each officer's name, the number of years on the force, and the total amount of training each has received, and acknowledged that most of the use-of-force incidents took place at night and Downtown. The paper did not, however, note that every one of the 10 officers is assigned to the DTAC – which just happens to patrol Sixth Street.*
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Painful (Misleading) Numbers
Even had the Statesman used arrest rates as the basis of its use-of-force figures, and even if it had done a more thorough analysis of what the database actually says, its conclusions would still be fatally flawed – because the use-of-force database is itself so unreliable. Under APD policy, officers are required to complete a use-of-force report when the person against whom force is used complains of pain or injury. "For purposes of reporting, the temporary discomfort associated with the initial arrest procedure does not constitute a complaint of injury," the report reads (emphasis in original). "The determination to fill out a Use of Force Report Form will be based on a consistent and repetitive complaint of pain beyond the initial arrest procedure."
Yet the use-of-force database includes numerous reports made by officers even when no complaint of injury was ever made. (The Statesman inconsistently described the policy for filing – as required in case of a complaint of injury, and also as a duty in every instance.) Of the 5,555 reports reviewed by the Chronicle, 2,166 (39%) were filed even though no complaint of injury had been made. (Many others were filed in response to complaints arising from "discomfort" associated with arrest – for which officers are not required to file reports – and 202 left the complaint of injury field blank.) Once those 2,166 reports are removed, there are 3,389 total reports that include 2,567 individuals and 2,310 incidents. Of those, 92% ended in arrest, 45% of the individuals involved were white, and almost half of the incidents occurred in the Downtown Area Command or CWAC. Those numbers suggest that the presence of the unnecessary reports skews the database, though not by much. But what about the reports that are not there? Who are the officers who use force and – either properly, according to APD policy, or not – choose not to file reports? Who were their subjects? In what ways are they different from the officers, and the subjects, whose reports are in the database? We can never know, because the database is neither a complete set nor a valid sample. APD veterans say younger officers, attempting to document everything, are more likely to overreport incidents of force. Conversely, the database may also be missing reports that should've been filed but that more veteran officers didn't feel were required.

The report form itself amplifies the unreliability of the data. For example, there are no definitions provided for what constitutes a "serious" vs. "minor" injury. That determination is left up to the individual officer, and an "elbow abrasion" might be recorded as serious by one officer and as minor by another. The department is certainly aware of the reporting deficiencies: On Oct. 6 the board members overseeing Austin's federal Local Law Enforcement Block Grant (including First Assistant District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, District Judge Jon Wisser, and APD Assistant Chief Rick Coy) approved allocating $263,100 of federal funding, to be matched by $29,233 in city money, to improve the department's Early Warning System, of which the use-of-force database is a part. The EWS is designed to allow the APD to track officer behaviors and identify patterns of conduct that could lead to more serious incidents. Coy said at the time that although parts of the EWS model are in place, the department is aware that the system needs to be improved.

So, months before the Statesman's overreaching and melodramatic exposé, the department was already pursuing ways to better police its own regarding use of force. At a time when tensions between the minority community and the APD are already heightened – most recently in connection with the June 14 shooting death of Jessie Lee Owens by Officer Scott Glasgow – the Statesman took the low road, choosing to throw a little gasoline on the fire. In short, while it was a bad week for APD's rank-and-file, it was a dismal week for accurate and responsible journalism.
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Real Life, Real Numbers
By JORDAN SMITH

The Statesman's dramatic "rate of force" statistics – purporting to show that blacks are the target of police force twice as often as whites – rely on a fundamental fumbling of the data. The daily's disparities are almost entirely explained by the vastly greater arrest rate for African-Americans than for other racial groups, a fact that is true of the U.S. as a whole and of most American cities. Nearly all APD use-of-force reports (92%) relate to arrests; compare those reports to APD arrest statistics, as we've done with the "force/arrest index" below, and you'll find real differences between the races, but nothing close to the statistics manufactured by the Statesman.
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% of Austin population* – 52.9% White, 9.8% Black, 30.6% Hispanic
Suspect in arrests** – 36.4% White, 26.2% Black, 37.1% Hispanic
Subject of use-of-force reports*** – 35.3% White, 30.6% Black, 30.3% Hispanic*
As of April 1, 2000. Source: U.S. Census Bureau. Total population: 656,562
** Oct. 31, 1998 to May 11, 2003. Source: APD. Total arrests: 553,194
*** Oct. 31, 1998 to May 11, 2003. Source: APD. Total reports: 6,447
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Despite what the Statesman says, the likelihood that a suspect facing arrest will be met with force is roughly equal across racial lines ...

FORCE/ARREST INDEX
White .970
Black 1.168
Hispanic .817
Compares use-of-force figures with arrest figures
Higher number indicates greater likelihood of use of force
1.0 – citywide average
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... What the statistics really show is that blacks are more likely to be arrested than are whites, a national phenomenon that prompts serious questions about social equity, which the entire community should address.

ANNUAL ARREST RATE PER 1,000 PERSONS
White 127
Hispanic 225
Black 495
Based on 553,194 total arrests between Oct. 31, 1998 and May 11, 2003. Source: APD.
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Knee, Wynn, Futrell Austin's 'A' Team
By JORDAN SMITH

On Jan. 28, city leaders announced a three-part plan to improve relations between Austin police and the city's minority communities. APD Chief Stan Knee told reporters that the press conference was intended as an update on city plans to address concerns raised by the Travis Co. grand jury that indicted Officer Scott Glasgow on Oct. 20. In their two-page report, the grand jurors expressed concern over a "different brand of law enforcement" in Austin's minority neighborhoods and called on city and county leaders to open a public discussion about "race and the distrust that runs in our community." Knee said that it was a mere "coincidence" that the event took place on the last day of the Statesman's four-part series on police use of force, in which the daily concluded that APD officers use force against blacks and Hispanics at substantially higher rates than against whites. But other city officials – including City Manager Toby Futrell and Mayor Will Wynn – seemed to direct their comments squarely as a response to the daily's statistically questionable exposé.

Knee offered an apology to Austin's citizens for the "history of the policing profession," he said, which has compounded the distrust some minorities feel toward police. "Historically, local governments used the police department to enforce laws that were inappropriate," he said. "Laws that encouraged segregation, kept some school children from going to school, and kept people from voting." Still, he lauded the APD as one of the nation's most professional policing organizations – noting that the APD is one of only four agencies nationwide to have received national accreditation.

Nonetheless, Knee was joined by Futrell and Wynn to announce their "Action, Accountability, Access" plan for improving police-community relations. Knee – master of the Action segment – told reporters that he wants to reduce the number of random searches of vehicles conducted by police, provide officers (especially cadets) with additional communication-skills training, and supply more officers with less-than-lethal weaponry, including Tasers and beanbag shotguns. Specifically, Knee said he'd like to see APD reduce the rarely fruitful random searches by 40% over the next two years and will require officers to get written consent before conducting a search. Veteran officers have better communication skills, he said, honed from years of street-level interaction, skills that Knee wants to teach younger officers through additional training. And less-than-lethal weapons, he said, could reduce the number of incidents where officers use "deadly force." By the end of the year, he pledged, the department will have added 122 Tasers to the current total of 144, and 37 additional beanbag shotguns, to augment the current complement of 33.

Futrell – captain of Accountability – said she would ensure that Knee follows through with the three Action items, analyzing "data to ensure that we see change," and promised that city management will stay "open to new approaches and solutions." And Wynn – the plan's Access commander – said he would set up a series of "nontraditional street-level discussions" between city officials and residents, to try to determine whether the perceived minority distrust of police is actually "bigger than that and, essentially, bigger than our police department," he said.

Aside from the Action items, the comments of the chief and assembled city leaders appeared tailor-made to assuage hostilities whipped up by the Statesman series. Knee commented – twice – that the APD does not calculate a rate of force the same way that the Statesman did, but aside from those brief jabs, not one person questioned the validity of the daily's findings. Instead, they focused their energy on more conciliatory remarks. Wynn said he has never met a victim of police force, "especially lethal force," at any of APD's regular Commander's Forum meetings in the community, but said he'd like to meet them and "facilitate patrol officers meeting them." (The mayor's misstatement went largely unnoticed.) Futrell said that Austin was recently ranked the second safest major city in the country, and that APD officers are far less likely to use force than their counterparts in comparable cities – but added that the city "cannot ignore" data that suggests there is a disparity in "how policing works among the minority neighborhoods." Acknowledging the problem offers the city a chance to "take real identifiable steps to address" it, she said.

Meanwhile, on Jan. 30, the Austin Police Association and Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas responded with their own press conference, calling for the city to step up its Action. "We want action, not words," said APA President Mike Sheffield, "before we have another incident." The APD rank-and-file have "nothing to hide," he said, adding that if the city really wants change, there's no reason to wait: City officials should immediately equip every officer with a Taser, install video cameras in every police vehicle, and ensure that there is enough staffing in each sector of the city so that officers don't have to wait for backup. Sheffield and CLEAT President Ron DeLord said that they were angry at Knee for not standing up for his officers. "If he doesn't have the backbone to stand up, then we have no confidence in him," said DeLord.
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The Real Race Problem
BY MIKE CLARK-MADISON

A cowardly city hides behind a dishonest daily's tall tales

Let me start by saying, in this space, for (by my count) the sixth time in 18 months: The Austin Police Department has a race problem. It's a problem that can't be solved without dramatic change – not (or not only) on the street, but at the very top of the department and in the most rarefied echelons of City Hall. Chief Stan Knee and his top brass – and the commitment of the mayor, City Council, and city management team both to effective public safety and to social equity, which should be one and the same thing – are no longer trusted by the community, particularly the African-American community, or by the APD rank and file. Whether that lack of trust has "any basis in fact" or is "just a PR problem" is an irrelevant distinction – a police department that isn't trusted by the citizens it serves or by its front-line officers cannot do its job and is not worth the money spent on it. So Knee has to go, big changes need to be made, and City Hall and APD have to start from zero.

All of this was true before the Statesman's incredibly amateurish and reprehensible series last week on APD's use of force. Just as it did last year with its Barton Springs debacle, the daily played games with numbers it doesn't understand, pulled meaningless statistics out of its ass, claimed to have discovered hitherto unknown truths that simply don't exist, and contrived to tell its tall tales in the most outrageous (in the literal sense) and self-serving manner possible. And then, in the voice of Editor Rich Oppel, it pulled its usual Eddie Haskell: "We never said the cops were racist!" I don't even know how to be that sleazy. Perhaps Oppel can teach me, because he is, after all, a recognized leader in the profession.

So not only as a journalist, but as a citizen and human being, I am appalled. Yet, as a realist who knows political life is often far from righteous, I know it doesn't matter. Because the big story here is not that the Statesman told tall tales, but that City Hall went along with them. Last year, Toby Futrell and the City Council patiently, methodically, and more-or-less completely demolished the Statesman's falsehoods about Barton Springs being poisoned. This year, City Hall has meekly agreed with the daily's just-as-ridiculous conclusions about APD's use of force. Or, perhaps, has pretended to agree, because doing so helps serve City Hall's own political ends. Despite the expressions of pain and grief from Will Wynn and Futrell, the Statesman appears to have told them exactly what they wanted to hear.
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Skewing the Numbers
In this issue, Jordan Smith does a detailed autopsy on the stinking corpse of the Statesman's APD series (see p.26), so only a few observations here. In some ways, the APD series was more prudent than the Statesman's Barton Springs hit job – there's no equivalent of the mythical coal-gas waste dump. But the statistical work at the core of the effort is even sloppier. You need to know something about how water quality is monitored to see what's wrong with the Statesman's Barton Springs analysis, but any clever high school math student can spot the really, really big flaws in the daily's "rate of force" calculations. The database of reports of APD use of force is not a valid, representative sample of the larger database of police contacts to which the Statesman compares it. So the daily's "rate of force" is a meaningless pseudo-actuarial statistic.
You could just as easily concoct a "rate of snakebite" to measure the likelihood that you or I or any other Austinite right now will be bitten by a rattlesnake. That chance is greater than zero for everyone, but it's a lot higher for people who happen to be walking in the tall weeds. If you only looked at people walking in the tall weeds – unless those people happened to be an accurate demographic sample of the city at large – your rate-of-snakebite stats would be seriously skewed.

And the chance of being met by police force is, theoretically, also greater than zero for all of us right now. But it's a lot, lot, lot higher for people who are getting arrested, and those people are clearly not an accurate demographic sample of the city at large. The vast disparities the daily found in use-of-force rates between the races are almost completely explained by the fact that African-Americans are, relatively speaking, far more likely to be arrested than whites, and police force, of any kind, is almost exclusively (nine out of 10 times) used when officers are attempting to arrest suspects. That's why APD compares its use-of-force data to arrests, not to contacts. Control the numbers for arrests, and the rate of force still shows statistical differences between the races that are worthy of public concern – but hardly shocking disparities whose exposure is worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.

Now, the fact that blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites is deplorable, but it's not unique to Austin or APD – it's true in almost every major American city, whether due to unfair racial profiling, historical and current social inequity, or both, or something else. None of those phenomena are reflected in the Statesman's analysis of this issue, on which the daily is suddenly so expert. Using the Statesman's methodology, you could also deduce an APD "rate of force" used against men that is many orders of magnitude greater than that used against women. Nobody would find this fact noteworthy, because we understand why this would be so – that there are other variables at play. There are likewise other variables at play here, ones that the Statesman could have easily accounted for in its analysis. The daily chose not to, and now pretends that because it doesn't know how to explain its own results, they must be true.

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A Leadership Vacuum
But why have Will Wynn and Toby Futrell and (if only halfheartedly) Stan Knee all been willing to agree that the numbers must be true? City Hall – especially Futrell – is no doubt weary of repeated pissing matches with the Statesman (on the environment) and the Chronicle (on public safety). Since Knee, Wynn, and Futrell have all already acknowledged that APD has some sort of race problem, it may seem fruitless to quibble about the details.
But if you believe, as I believe, that Knee and his top brass, and to a degree City Hall, are the real source of APD's race problem – through their cowardice and lack of leadership – this explanation is less than satisfactory. The Statesman series – with its widely and aptly criticized mug shots of individual cops – has sent the message that APD's race problem originates not at the top but on the street, which is a convenient illusion for City Hall to embrace. Tweak the training, create some task forces, give the cops new, less-dangerous toys, levy some selectively harsh punishments on the rank and file, and this will all go away. You don't have to be at all sympathetic to the cop on the street to know that this is jive, and to their credit, APD's most vocal critics – the black ministers and the NAACP and the ACLU – have largely refused to take the bait.

I don't think it's any coincidence that City Hall's sticky embrace of the Statesman's findings comes right in the middle of contract negotiations with the Austin Police Association. The police union has become the villain in this saga precisely because it has accumulated so much power in recent years – thanks to the leadership vacuum at the top of the department. If APA President Mike Sheffield is really running the police department, it's because nobody else is. If the union has too much stroke, it's because City Hall has spent years pandering to conservative pro-cop voters by throwing money at APD without much caring how, and to what end, it gets spent. Instead of blaming the APA for being too effective in representing its members, we should be blaming City Hall and Knee for being too ineffective in representing the citizens at large. But until now, there has been no political upside for the City Council in asking tough questions about what kind of police department Austin wants and how we should devote resources to creating it.

Now, apparently, there is such an upside – it's more useful for City Hall to ally itself with APD critics than with APD defenders, even if it means swallowing the Statesman's findings without gagging. A better strategy, of course, would be for City Hall to show some leadership on the racial issues that Austin has so liberally and tolerantly swept under the carpet for years. Our city is terribly self-segregated; service delivery (both public and private) in communities of color is inadequate and in many ways getting worse; and opportunities for civic success, or even stability, that the Anglo majority (for now) takes for granted simply don't exist for other Austinites. We are, in short, a big American city, with unfortunately typical urban problems, of which APD's race problem is but one acute symbol. So far, neither City Hall nor APD have risen to the real challenge – and despite its posturing, the Statesman has made it easier, not harder, for the city to (so to speak) cop out.
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Charges Dropped in APD Case
By JORDAN SMITH

On Dec. 19 the Travis Co. District Attorney's Office dismissed all charges pending against Austin Police Department Officer Michael Olsen, who was facing prosecution on three counts of tampering with a government record. Olsen was accused of providing false information in a police report in connection with a June 2002 altercation on Sixth Street. According to the grand jury's August 2003 indictment, Olsen wrote several false statements regarding Jeffrey Thornton in a police report about a June 20, 2002, incident. In December 2002, Olsen received a 60-day suspension from the department, which ended last February. According to the APD disciplinary memo, Thornton was near the corner of Sixth and Red River around 2:15am on June 20, 2002, where he saw Olsen responding to an altercation. "Thornton observed Officer Olsen take enforcement action and made a comment to his friend that he thought ... Olsen's actions were inappropriate," the memo reads. Olsen apparently heard Thornton's comments and responded by using "inappropriate language toward ... Thornton and grabbed his arms and escorted him to [another officer's] squad car," where Olsen intended to write Thornton a ticket for being a "pedestrian in the roadway."

While at the car, "Olsen used inappropriate force against ... Thornton, which caused ... Thornton to hit the ground and injure his head," the memo reads. "Olsen's actions enraged the crowd, which became hostile towards the police and EMS personnel." But in his police report -- and then later, during an interview with APD's Internal Affairs -- Olsen told a slightly different story, reporting that Thornton had approached "directly toward me and came very close to me," Further, he reported that Thornton followed him around, yelling at him. Olsen's account was challenged after IA investigators obtained a videotape of the event, recorded by cameras on the Texas Lottery Commission building on the corner of Sixth and Red River. According to the department's disciplinary memo, Olsen's "police report and ... affidavits do not accurately reflect what occurred," that night.

Still, the DA's office wiped Olsen's slate clean last month, citing insufficient evidence to prosecute the case -- a decision that angered Thornton's attorney Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project. Harrington fired off a letter to DA Ronnie Earle on Dec. 29, complaining that Thornton was not advised of the decision to dismiss the case, in violation of Thornton's rights as a crime victim under state law. "[I]t appears that, once again, officers who abuse their office are protected by your office," Harrington wrote, "and victims of police abuse are slighted by your office -- not all victims are treated the same." On Jan. 6, Harrington got a letter of reply from First Assistant DA Rosemary Lehmberg, who wrote that the facts in the Olsen case "did not rise to the level" of a prosecutable offense. The DA's office, she wrote, did not feel that they could prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Olsen's statements were "intentional misstatements" and not merely "misstatements."

Thornton's civil rights suit against Olsen, filed by Harrington last summer, is still pending in federal district court.
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Naked City
No Charges for Chapman
By JORDAN SMITH

Retiring Austin Police Department Assistant Chief Jimmy Chapman will not face criminal charges that he committed perjury while under oath earlier this year, according to the Travis Co. district attorney's office -- but how they reached that conclusion is still a mystery. Assistant DA Claire Dawson Brown told the Chronicle that after reviewing statements taken by outside investigator James McLaughlin she was unable to find any "criminal conduct that could be prosecuted," she said. "It is very difficult to prosecute perjury," partially because of the "many nuances" of the English language, she said.

Chapman had been under investigation since late August, when APD Chief Stan Knee hired McLaughlin, general counsel for the Texas Police Chiefs Association, to conduct an inquiry into whether Chapman lied while under oath during a deposition taken in the whistle-blower lawsuit filed by Officer Jeff White. White claims he was transferred by Chapman in retaliation for allegations White made regarding Chapman's possible misconduct during and after the controversial Mala Sangre narcotics operation in the 1990s. During his deposition, Chapman claimed he had nothing to do with White's transfer and that he was "shocked" by the allegation.

Chapman's testimony regarding White's transfer was directly contradicted by Knee's own testimony in the White case, but the chief only asked McLaughlin to investigate whether Chapman also lied about a different matter -- trying to remove the phone records of Chapman's friend John Maspero, then an FBI agent and now the disgraced ex-Williamson Co. sheriff -- from an APD Internal Affairs file in a case unrelated to Mala Sangre. Although McLaughlin was initially given 30 days to complete that inquiry, his report was not presented to city officials until Dec. 17, one day before Chapman filed his paperwork to retire from the department and thus effectively escaped any possible discipline from Knee -- that is, if McLaughlin's $30,000 taxpayer-funded inquiry actually determined that Chapman lied under oath. The results of the inquiry are officially unavailable; sources tell the Chronicle that after nearly four months of investigation, McLaughlin determined only that the case against Chapman was "inconclusive."

Apparently the DA's office took its cue from McLaughlin's report -- and only McLaughlin's report. It is unclear whether either McLaughlin or the DA's office actually read any of the deposition testimony taken in the case -- either from Chapman or from former IA detectives Gary Fleming and Rick Cockman, who each testified that Chapman and Maspero came to them and demanded the removal of the Maspero records. Cockman added that he'd tried reporting the incident numerous times, "which is what really surprises me about this independent investigator and everything," he testified. "I have been telling people about this for three or four years and nobody seemed to care."

White's attorney Don Feare said that McLaughlin contacted him once, seeking a copy of White's deposition testimony, but never asked for any other transcripts. Feare added that Lowell Denton, the attorney defending the city against White's suit, assured Feare that he had no contact with McLaughlin and was staying away from the independent inquiry. "The allegation is that [Chapman] committed perjury in testimony while under oath," Feare said. "Yet they didn't read [Chapman's] testimony? The DA made a determination based off of some notes taken by a guy [McLaughlin] who was paid $30,000 by an interested party. But sworn testimony always trumps some guy's notes."

Feare feels the Chapman affair proves that APD and City Hall leaders would rather not dive deeper into the ethical allegations surrounding Mala Sangre. "It would have been proper to go to [DA] Ronnie Earle and ask that [he] empanel a special grand jury," he said. But by making their determination based on McLaughlin's report, "the DA has cut off the right of the people to have a police officer investigated for perjury." he said. "How much credibility does the city have if they are willing to throw this case in the trash can? If truth and integrity in Austin were on the commodities market, they would not be trading well."
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Top Ten APD Moments
By JORDAN SMITH

1) The Sound of Glasses Clinking: APD Assistant Chief Jimmy Chapman has left the building. Yes, it's true. Although he has insisted that he's done nothing wrong, even as controversy and allegations of improper conduct have swarmed around him all year, Chapman unexpectedly decided to leave the APD effective Dec. 31. What will happen with the Jeff White whistle-blower lawsuit? What will happen with the administrative and/or criminal inquiry into the allegation that Chapman committed perjury while under oath in July? That's a story for 2004...
2) Issues? What Issues?: "We meet issues head-on. That's my slogan; that's my motto in the department." That's what Chief Stan Knee told reporters during a Nov. 19 press conference regarding a Travis Co. grand jury report that raises questions about policing practices. Unfortunately, Knee's slogan doesn't appear to have taken hold; 2003 saw another barrage of accusations that his administration engages in disparate disciplinary practices and a continuation of administrative denial of the long-standing allegations of criminal corruption within the department's upper ranks.

3) Blame Game: To recap: The city blames the Austin Police Association; the APA blames the city. Will anybody ever see the contents of the outside investigation into the Sophia King shooting?

4) It's All About the Paper, Silly: The "official" response to Lucy Neyens' allegation that Detective Howard Staha forced her to perform oral sex on him in exchange for continued police protection for her son, a former APD confidential informant, was that the case was "inconclusive." Yet, in a confidential memo penned by Knee, the chief tells Staha that his actions in the case were inappropriate. Conflict? Yes, but does the city care? Apparently not: What's really bothering them is how the Chronicle managed to snag that memo. In September, the city hired a private investigator to look into the matter. No word on the outcome yet, but we're sure it was $5,000 well spent.

5) Don't Look Behind the Curtain: Over the past six years city officials have settled at least two whistle-blower lawsuits related to the now-defunct, mid-Nineties undercover drug investigation code-named Mala Sangre. This has, of course, given them the edge in avoiding all questions related to that scandalous affair. But it appears that lucky streak has come to an end. In 2003, city officials finally met their match: Officer Jeff White. White pushed his suit (originally filed in mid-2002) further in one year -- uncovering several nasty APD skeletons in the process -- than anyone else ever has.

6) Reeling One In: Chief Knee slammed his iron fist this fall, disciplining six officers who were popped for fishing while on duty. Sure, the incident was embarrassing, and, sure, the officers shouldn't be fishing while working and in uniform (imagine the dry-cleaning bills!). Still, it's hard to rally around Knee's decision when, within the same time frame, he's basically offered Jimmy Chapman a complete pass on potential administrative and criminal violations related to an allegation that he committed perjury while under oath. Now that's meeting issues head-on.

7) The Truth Hurts: During a September deposition taken in connection with White's whistle-blower suit, retired 31-year department veteran Gary Fleming offered testimony that completely dismantled the city's official line about the Mala Sangre investigation. Fleming refuted the repeated assurances of Knee and City Manager Toby Futrell that all the Mala Sangre-related allegations had been fully vetted by internal investigators. According to Fleming, who spent 18 years as an Internal Affairs investigator, none of the allegations were fully investigated, and only a handful were even reviewed in any way -- and only under the strict direction of APD brass.

8) Life in Limbo: Will Officer Scott Glasgow face criminal charges as a result of the June shooting death of Jessie Lee Owens? Will he face departmental sanction? The answers are still unknown, yet the Owens shooting -- the details of which are still sketchy -- touched off a political firestorm. We can only hope that all the political posturing won't derail justice for the officer or the victim.

9) Report? What Report?: Back in August, Knee made a big show of hiring outside investigator, and friend, James McLaughlin to head an inquiry into whether Chapman committed perjury while under oath. Originally, McLaughlin was given 30 days to complete his inquiry. Then the city issued a written extension, giving McLaughlin another 30 days. So, where's the report? According to the city, McLaughlin was offered two more verbal extensions to his contract. So, where's the report? Your guess is as good as ours -- but we're sure that was another $30,000 well spent.

10) Who Will Police the Police?: With no money on the table, tweaking civilian oversight was the biggest bargaining chip on the table during meet-and-confer contract negotiations between the city and the police union. The union offered to remove civilian oversight from their contract altogether, and to allow the city to make public the contents of any and all reports resulting from independent investigations -- two major concessions that should've made the city salivate, right? Whether city officials will take the union up on that fairly tremendous offer is still unknown, but we haven't seen any napkin-toting city officials.
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Chapman out the door, off the hook
By JORDAN SMITH

APD Assistant Chief Jimmy Chapman announced his retirement last week, the day after the conclusion of an investigation into his alleged misconduct.

In a surprising turn of events, Austin Police Department Assistant Chief Jimmy Chapman on Dec. 18 filed the necessary paperwork to retire from the department. Chapman, a 25-year APD veteran, will leave his post, effective Dec. 31, according to a press release issued by his lawyer, former Travis Co. sheriff and current state Rep. Terry Keel.

Chapman has been under investigation since August, when APD Chief Stan Knee hired an outside investigator to conduct an independent inquiry into an allegation that Chapman lied under oath during a July deposition taken in connection with a whistle-blower suit filed by Officer Jeff White. In his suit, filed in May 2002, White alleged that Chapman transferred him in retaliation for allegations White made about misconduct by Chapman in connection with the now-defunct mid-Nineties drug trafficking investigation code-named Mala Sangre. On July 10, Chapman was deposed in that case and testified that he had nothing to do with White's transfer, and that he was "shocked" by the allegation.

Further, Chapman said that he never tried to have APD Internal Affairs investigators remove a set of phone records (concerning calls made by Chapman's friend John Maspero, then an FBI agent, more recently the disgraced Williamson Co. sheriff) from the file of an unrelated 1997 investigation of now-retired Cmdr. Joe Putman. Indeed, Chapman testified that it would be inappropriate to even make such an inquiry into the contents of an IA file. Shortly thereafter, Knee announced that "a police department employee" came forward to allege that Chapman had lied about the phone records; and he hired James McLaughlin, head of the Texas Police Chiefs Association, to investigate the matter.

The phone records were not the only subject on which Chapman offered questionable testimony in the White case -- for example, Chapman's claim that he'd had nothing to do with White's transfer was directly challenged by Knee's own testimony, also in July. But McLaughlin was directed only to explore whether Chapman lied about the Maspero records. (Despite repeated requests for information and clarification, the city and APD have yet to indicate whether Chapman's alleged perjury -- a felony -- is to be investigated as a potential criminal offense.)

McLaughlin was originally given 30 days -- ending Sept. 22 -- to complete his inquiry, but the city authorized, in writing, one 30-day extension to the contract, ending Oct. 22. According to Assistant City Manager Laura Huffman, the city has since verbally extended McLaughlin's contract twice, to end Dec. 22. Last week, Huffman told the Chronicle that while McLaughlin's final report wasn't ready yet, she anticipated the inquiry would be wrapped up "this week or next." According to Keel's press release, McLaughlin issued his final report to city officials on Dec. 17, the day before Chapman announced his retirement. At press time, there was no word from APD or City Hall on the result of McLaughlin's inquiry or the content of his final report. However, sources close to the investigation say that the report indicates the inquiry was "inconclusive" -- that Chapman's alleged perjury could be neither proved nor disproved, and thus the assistant chief would not be subject to any departmental discipline.

A read between the lines of Keel's press release supports speculation that Chapman is off the hook for now. "It should be noted that the City of Austin legal staff are of the opinion that, absent a finding of wrongdoing, internal affairs reports, including the reports of outside counsel, are not within the realm of public disclosure," Keel wrote. (Emphasis ours.) Under Texas civil service law, such disclosure only follows when an officer receives discipline (be it a one-day suspension or a firing); the findings of investigations that only culminate in a reprimand are not subject to disclosure.

This may change if city officials accept a proposal offered by the Austin Police Association (for consideration in the union's next "meet and confer" contract) to make the contents of all independent investigative reports public (minus specific "investigatory details" -- generally the subject of privacy concerns). In his statement, Keel writes that he would "welcome the release of the report concerning the administrative inquiry of ... Chapman." Huffman declined to discuss McLaughlin's conclusions, but noted that, "when someone retires, they are no longer subject to discipline" by the department. Chapman filed for retirement the day after the report was handed to city officials; had McLaughlin sustained any allegation against him, Knee would have had one day to hand down any potential disciplinary sanction.

But according to Keel, Chapman had been considering retirement well before McLaughlin's inquiry. "Before the issue of his deposition testimony arose as a controversy ... Chapman had intended to consider retiring in October of 2003," Keel wrote. "He purposely did not do so because he wanted this matter to be fully concluded before he retired. He could have, at any time, retired and ended the jurisdiction of APD to conduct this investigation, but being a man of integrity and honesty, he did not do so."

While Chapman may have gotten out from under the McLaughlin investigation, his retirement will not shield him or the city from scrutiny in White's whistle-blower suit. "To the degree that [Chapman's retirement] would make an immediate change [to the lawsuit], that is not necessarily the case," said White's attorney Don Feare. "Clearly Jimmy Chapman is a major participant and a major subject in this lawsuit, and I believe that his credibility has been called into question to the degree that I am not sure that it would serve the city to have him as a witness in any further proceedings."
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