A variety of special protections by the Legislature and Austin city government make it very difficult for the public to investigate police brutality or misconduct incidents at the APD. Though the police receive hundreds of complaints each year, the City claims that none of these are public documents, even when complaints are upheld and the officers disciplined or fired. In addition, the entire investigative file is closed, including information that would become public in court if the case were against a common "perp" instead of a police officer. The only document related to complaints which the APD presently considers public is a one-page notice that's distributed departmentwide for every incident where an officer is suspended. Lesser disciplinary actions, such as verbal and written reprimands, reassignments, mandatory retraining, etc., seemingly should be public documents under Local Government Code 143.089(2), but thus far the City refuses to release those documents.

Though city attorneys point to state statutes allowing them to keep complaint and investigative documents closed, the ultimate decision actually rests with municipal government. The Legislature set up a system where cities may keep "optional" personnel files on police and firefighters that are not open to the public, but this is not mandatory. The Austin City Council may decide whether or not to use this system, which has no parallel in any other city department.

The City maintains that even when complaints are upheld by Internal Affairs and an officer is suspended, complaints and investigative files are not subject to the Public Information Act. Several recent Attorney General's opinions appear to say otherwise. According to my reading of the Act and of the AG's interpretations, complaints and investigative files of closed Internal Affairs cases which resulted in disciplinary action are supposed to be public, while documents related to complaints that are not "sustained" may not be released to the public. We will find out who is right when the AG responds to my appeal and to future open records requests in the coming months.

In other city departments and in non-law enforcement state agencies, all complaints are public records, whether "sustained" or not. Only through vigorous lobbying by powerful police unions, including the Austin Police Association, have police officers been shielded from the public scrutiny afforded other government workers. In July 1998, the city agreed to report some future complaint data to the City Council as part of the Cedar Avenue litigation settlement, but this still falls short of the amount of information available about complaints to other city departments.

Because the public cannot know the content of complaints against the APD, we are reduced to examining the volume of complaints. Unhappily, that volume is substantial. Recently the author filed open records requests with the APD for aggregate complaint statistics. It turned out they were a mess. Since 1995, the APD Internal Affairs Department has not produced any sort of standard report on aggregate complaints to the chief, the city manager, the council or anybody else. APD can't even produce actual statistics for 1994 (the stat in my chart is a number an apologetic APD rep referred me to from estimates in an old city budget). What's more, I was given two contradicting sets of statistics for 1995 (e.g., one report totalled 382 complaints, and the other 393; the number of complaints handled at the supervisor level differed in the two reports by 25).

Here's the aggregate complaint data, acquired from Open Records requests, from which the above graphic was produced:

As of mid-July 1998, 288 complaints had already been received by APD Internal Affairs this year, putting them on track to break last year's record by a significant margin. The results of this research indicate huge recent increases in complaints. In the mid-90s (94-97), the number of complaints against the APD nearly tripled, from 180 in 1994 to 481 in 1997, a 167 percent increase in just three years.

Because of understaffing in Internal Affairs, more and more disciplinary duties have fallen to supervisors. In 1990, only 1.8 percent of complaints were investigated at the supervisory level; in 1993, 9.8 percent of complaints were investigated by supervisors. But in 1995, the year the number of complaints jumped, supervisors investigated 32 percent of the complaint caseload, 28.5 percent in 1996, and 20.6 percent in 1997. (Keep in mind that the total number of cases have continued to escalate wildly, contributing to the percentage decline.) Perhaps contributing to the escalation, supervisors tended to be more lenient on their investigations than Internal Affairs staff. For example, in 1997 Internal Affairs upheld 53.26 percent of the complaints it examined compared to 38.38 percent of cases handled by supervisors. In 1995, Internal Affairs sustained 60.32 percent of the cases it investigated, compared with 42.27 percent for supervisors.

Better late than never, the city and APD have attempted to close the barn door now that the horses have left, expanding the Internal Affairs Department by 55 percent (from 9 to 14 full time staff) in the 97-98 budget cycle, and upping the IA budget by 44 percent. Is a 55 percent increase in staff enough to offset a 167 percent increase in caseload? It seems unlikely, but only time will tell.

By Scott Henson, August 1998

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