State Trooper Deployment Targeted Black and Brown Neighborhoods with Unclear Effect on Crime

DPS patrolling in July (Photo by Jana Birchum)

March 27: The spring announcement that Texas Department of Public Safety troopers would soon begin patrolling the streets of Austin was the first sign that voters had elected a mayor who would operate much differently than the previous leader – one who would be perfectly comfortable negotiating and executing backroom deals with the state's increasingly extremist Republican governor, Greg Abbott, without any input from the public or City Council. Most Council members learned of the DPS partnership with the Austin Police Department about 15 minutes before the rest of the public did.

What followed was a deployment that bore striking resemblance to the racist policing strategies that fueled the war on drugs. People living in Austin's Eastside described what were essentially police checkpoints that resulted in a concentration of arrests among the Black and Latino Austinites living in those neighborhoods. Most arrests and citations were for possession of marijuana, a criminal offense that the Austin electorate has made clear it does not want to be treated as a crime.

All the while, APD defended the partnership with shoddy data science barely refuted by Council – including the CMs representing Austin's primarily Black and Latino districts that were clamoring for relief from DPS occupation. The APD-DPS partnership finally ended in July amid troopers conducting dangerous high-speed chases and shooting people.