Naked City

According to a Dec. 17 ruling from the Texas attorney general, Austin officials may not release the report of the independent investigation into the June 2002 police shooting of Sophia King. The report, initiated by the Office of the Police Monitor's citizen review panel earlier this year, was completed in September, but has stayed under wraps ever since. The city had asked the AG's office to weigh in on whether the city could make the findings of that report public -- under either the state's civil service law, the civilian oversight portion of the city's "meet and confer" contract with the Austin Police Association; or pursuant to a previous AG ruling related to common-law privacy issues. The AG said no to all three possibilities.

In his ruling, Assistant Attorney General Denis C. McElroy notes that under civil service law, investigative documents are only subject to release when an officer receives some discipline for an act of wrongdoing. That did not happen in the case of Officer John Coffey, who fired the shot that killed 23-year-old King -- who was reportedly attacking a housing complex manager with a knife -- at the Rosewood Courts in East Austin on June 11, 2002. A "document relating to an officer's alleged misconduct may not be placed in his civil service personnel file" -- and thus made available to the public -- "if there is insufficient evidence to sustain the charge of misconduct," McElroy wrote.

As for meet-and-confer, McElroy wrote, while a civil service city such as Austin can write into a police contract a provision to allow certain disclosures, the current contract has no such provision. McElroy points to the city's own standard operating procedures regarding outside investigations -- drafted when the citizen panel called for an outside probe in the King case, the first such investigation in the OPM's brief history -- to make his point. According to the SOPs: "All information obtained as a result of the Independent Investigation, including the findings of the Independent Investigator, are solely for the use of the [APD] in the administrative investigation of alleged police misconduct." The city's initial draft of these SOPs contained a clause that would authorize the release of summary information and conclusions of independent investigations; that provision was left out of the final draft. (The APA had challenged in court -- and lost -- the city's power to draft these SOPs without union approval, so the city has no one to blame but itself.)

The flap over the "hidden" report will likely end soon if, during their current contract negotiations, the city accepts the APA's offer to release all reports of independent investigations to the public. The last meet-and-confer agreement expired in September; in the absence of significant salary increases, much of the attention in the current round of talks has focused on the OPM and civilian oversight process.