APD Implements Suggested 'Action Items'

Art Acevedo (Photo by John Anderson)

The Austin Police Department concurs with and has implemented most of the 165 "action items" for improving the department made in a U.S. Department of Justice "technical assistance" document issued last December. In a letter penned last month and released publicly Dec. 21, Chief Art Acevedo detailed APD's responses to the suggested improvements in department policies and procedures – including, importantly, changes to the policy on use of force. So far, Acevedo said Monday, roughly 75% to 80% of the recommendations have been implemented.

The DOJ began reviewing APD policies and practices in mid-2007, when it agreed to look into complaints made in 2004 by Nelson Linder of the Austin NAACP and Jim Harrington with the Texas Civil Rights Project, who were concerned about use of excessive force against minority suspects, including in the high-profile shooting deaths of Sophia King in 2002 and Jesse Lee Owens in 2003. (The DOJ told city officials it would be coming to town to investigate the complaint just one day after the fatal shooting of Kevin Brown in 2007; that incident was quickly added to the feds' investigation.)

In all, there were just four DOJ recommendations with which Acevedo did not agree – including two recommendations limiting how canines are used in searching for suspects (APD policy governing canine use is "very restrictive," he wrote), a suggestion that incidents in which an officer points a Taser at someone but does not pull the trigger be separately reported as use-of-force incidents (APD already reports so-called "active targeting" incidents in field observation and incident reports), and a recommendation that the department check the use of pepper spray by weighing the canisters officers carry (Acevedo said in an interview that that sort of check would be redundant and not an effective use of time or resources).

"I think that in the overall scheme of things, this is definitely a dramatic improvement," said Harrington. "It will never be a panacea." After all, he said, "we're human beings and so there are always going to be malfunctions" – but the changes made since Acevedo took the helm in mid-2007 are a "major step" for "professionalizing" the department. "I think that certainly that has been the result of our complaint," he said.