Local attorney Margo
Frasier was just 23 years old when she became the Travis County Jail’s first
female shift supervisor in 1977. Not long after settling into her new job, a
couple of the 10 male corrections officers she oversaw put her through a little
test. As she stood by one of the cell blocks, two guards stationed down the
hall set loose a hulking, mentally ill prisoner who was serving time for
multiple rapes. “This guy was nude, covered in feces, screaming at the top of
his lungs — sexual things — he didn’t get to see many women,” Frasier
recalls. “So they purposely let him go after me. I wasn’t sure how far they
would let it go. This guy could have killed me.”
In a calm voice, Frasier stopped the prisoner dead in his tracks. “I told him
his grandmother, whom I had let visit him the Sunday before, would be very
disappointed in his behavior. We’d had such a nice talk,” Frasier
laughs. To the offending officers, she issued a warning: “Okay, I passed the
test. Don’t let there be another.”
The other candidate for Travis County Sheriff, Alvin Shaw, who is currently
serving as Chief Deputy under Sheriff Terry Keel, is also no stranger to
breaking barriers: he was one of the first African-Americans to rise to the
ranks of lieutenant in the Austin Police Department. He may have similar
stories regarding his 18-year career at APD, but he won’t share any anecdotes
with the Chronicle — he refuses a personal interview because,
he explains, the paper showed bias when it chose not to endorse a
Sheriff’s candidate in the Republican primary last March. (Shaw’s comments for
this article were taken from candidates’ forums and a meeting he attended last
February with the Chronicle editorial board.)
Both candidates are looking to make history in Travis County this November. If
Democrat Frasier becomes sheriff, she will be the first woman to do so. If
Republican Shaw wins, he will be the first African-American.
Shaw, 45, is a veteran law enforcement officer who worked his way up through
the ranks at APD from 1974 to 1992, before being plucked by Keel to become his
chief administrative officer four years ago. While at the police department,
Shaw, whose buttoned-down corporate demeanor belies his crime-fighting
experience, was the lieutenant in charge of a wide range of assignments,
including youth services, narcotics, child abuse, patrol, and robbery/homicide.
He also served as field training coordinator and commander of the Austin area
regional drug abuse task force, and the street drug narcotics task force. Among
the accomplishments of which Shaw is most proud since joining the sheriff’s
office is his and Keel’s successful battle with the Travis County
commissioner’s Court to increase staffing levels. “Since I’ve been in the
sheriff’s office we have increased law enforcement by 45 positions, increased
corrections by 97 positions, and support personnel by 33,” Shaw says, adding
that the increases translate into more time off for officers.
Shaw also credits his and Keel’s administration for decreasing the time it
takes officers to respond to both emergency and non-emergency calls, and he
says that a change the administration made in shift times allows the office to
put more officers on the streets during peak hours. Shaw’s campaign literature
also boasts that while he’s been at the sheriff’s office, the administration
quadrupled the victim’s assistance unit, put inmates to work and placed them in
tents during the 1993-94 overcrowding crisis, and created a special auto theft
unit with a 90% recovery rate.
Shaw says that if elected, he will implement a plan he helped forge to
decrease staffing needs at the Del Valle prison by connecting the myriad
buildings at the site with secure corridors so prisoners can walk between
buildings unescorted. That would feed into another of his top priorities, he
says, which is putting more officers on street patrol. Of the department’s 1100
employees, about 600 are in corrections and 100 are on patrol.
Currently a partner at the high-dollar law firm of Bickerstaff, Heath &
Smiley, the frank-talkin’ Frasier, 43, has specialized in representing law
enforcement agencies throughout the state on criminal justice matters over the
past 11 years. The Travis County Sheriff’s office has been among her clients,
and Frasier takes credit for helping to acquire “an appropriation from the
state that allowed counties to build emergency housing like those emergency
beds [in tents at the county prison] in Del Valle that Keel likes to talk about
so much.” Before going to law school, Frasier worked her way up through Travis
County’s jail system to become the first female captain in the Sheriff’s
Department from 1977 to 1982.
While Shaw’s literature stresses that he is the only candidate with
contemporary corrections experience, Frasier points out that Shaw never worked
at the Sheriff’s Office until Keel hired him away from APD in 1992, and thus
has very little hands-on experience running the jail system. “What I’ve been
doing for 20 years is directly related to the biggest job of the Sheriff, which
is running the prison system,” Frasier says. “I can return home to the
Sheriff’s Office and spot where there is tremendous waste in the jail system
and know how to run it much more humanely and efficiently.” Nearly 80% of the
Sheriff’s $50 million budget is spent on the jail system.
Among the innovative programs Frasier says she instituted while working at the
Del Valle jail is the county’s first work release program, to allow deadbeat
dads to continue to work to make child support payments. She says that the
prison’s crop program — which Shaw refers to in his campaign literature —
began under her watch, as did the practice of linking the work that inmates do,
to their gaining certain privileges — a popular idea that had been difficult
to enact because of constitutional restraints.
Frasier says that if elected, she will save $1.5 million by finding
alternatives to hauling the hundreds of prisoners who are transported from Del
Valle to the downtown courthouse every day only to find that most of their
cases have been put off or took only minutes to be disposed.
One of the issues that both candidates agree on is that, once in office, they
would run things very differently from current Sheriff Keel, the lone
Republican officeholder in Travis County, who bowed out of a seemingly sure
reelection bid to seek District 47’s state representative seat. But while
Frasier criticizes Keel for his tendency to attract costly lawsuits and his
intimidating management style, not surprisingly, Chief Deputy Shaw, Keel’s
current second-in-command, defends his boss. “I think that for the most part,
the community is extremely happy with the sheriff’s office. We were the first
in county government to develop a strategic plan to build for the future in
terms of where we wanted to go,” Shaw says. “Most important of all is we have
improved the image of the sheriff’s office.”
To much of the public, that heightened image is due to Keel’s determined, and
in his view heroic, efforts last year to force attorney Nona Byington to reveal
where her client buried the body of an infant victim. But for many of the 1100
Travis County sheriff’s employees, the case is merely a symbol of how the
current sheriff treats his employees — with fear tactics and intimidation.
Shaw, who won an Outstanding Texan Award from the state’s Legislative Black
Caucus in 1993, makes it clear that his management style differs greatly from
his boss’s. “Keel’s style, be it right or wrong, or whatever, is extremely
hands on, sometimes impulsive, and very tenacious,” Shaw says. “My management
style on the other hand — I’m a delegator. I believe in empowerment, in
pushing decisions down, and I really hope people can come to me with problems
and recommend solutions, so our management style is different.”
Frasier isn’t buying it. “He’s got to decide whether he is Keel or not,” she
says. “He says he’s different. But when given the opportunity, how has he
acted? Like Terry Keel.”
Specifically, Frasier is referring to a decision Shaw made last year to fire
sheriff’s officer Benny Cureton. Shaw wanted to oust Cureton, then a jail
employee, for anonymously forwarding an internal memo to County Judge Bill
Aleshire, with whom Sheriff Keel has had several well-publicized run-ins
regarding budget requests. The memo warned supervisors to withhold information
from county commissioners and Aleshire when contacted, and to notify a specific
captain when such calls come in. When Cureton, who is president of the Travis
County Sheriff’s Officers’ Association, was called in by Shaw and asked if he
had released the document, he immediately admitted that he had. But what
bothered Shaw was the conversation that followed. “My question [to Cureton]
was: `If you didn’t think you were doing something wrong in sharing an internal
document, regardless of the contents, with someone from the outside, why did
you do it anonymously?” Shaw recalls. “And (Cureton) couldn’t answer. And that
he was wrong for.”
Shaw told me in a taped interview last February that “It was not my
recommendation that in fact we fire Cureton.” But at a later civil service
hearing, Shaw admitted that he had recommended precisely that. Keel
subsequently demoted Cureton, an 18-year department veteran with a degree in
criminal justice management, to kitchen duty and stripped him of his peace
officer’s certification. Cureton is suing Keel for the loss of his commission
in the wake of the demotion, and, in a separate suit, for union-busting in
connection with firings that took place following the circulation among
employees of an anonymous newsletter.
Frasier says that her management approach will mirror the tack she took when
she was asked in 1981 to revamp what was then the downtown jail. “What I did at
the time is what I intend to do if I’m elected sheriff: Sit down, and ask
(employees) three questions: `What’s right about this place? What’s wrong about
this place? And what are the first three things you need to do to improve this
place?'” That approach earned Frasier the title of Correctional Officer of the
Year in 1981 from the National Jail Association.
Needless to say, the Sheriff’s Officers’ Association, headed by Cureton, has
endorsed Frasier. Both candidates readily debate the significance of that. Shaw
points out that only a fraction of the employees actually voted in the
association’s endorsement process, and “they were disgruntled.” He says,
“There’s an inherent conflict between labor and management… and associations
make decisions based upon me and mine… I have to consider what’s best for the
organization as a whole.” Frasier says the endorsement proves that the
employees “want a change,” from the Keel/Shaw administration, and will
therefore work better with her.
Frasier also received the unofficial endorsement of her fellow Democrat, Judge
Aleshire, who predicts that taxpayers will be a lot better off with a lawyer
than an ex-police lieutenant who worked for Keel. “We spent more money settling
lawsuits during the Keel/Shaw administration than in the history of this
county,” Aleshire says. “It’s time for us to return to a civil, working
relationship with the Sheriff.”
The Austin Police Association, on the other hand, endorsed Shaw. Shaw “wants
to take a hard-line on juvenile issues,” explains Sean Mannix, the APA’s
political action committee chair. “We already have a good working relationship
with him.”
What makes him the best equipped to lead the sheriff’s office into the next
century, Shaw says, is his three-pronged experience: in law enforcement as a
patrol officer at APD; in management as an APD lieutenant and, most recently,
as Keel’s chief administrator; and in corrections as supervisor of the largest
inmate labor project in Travis County history while at the sheriff’s office.
“It’s a job I know, I like, I’ve done, and I want,” he says.
Frasier, 43, is quick to disagree about whose experience is truly the most
valuable: “When I was with the department I spent most of my time in a
policy-making position,” she says. “That, quite frankly, is something new to
Alvin… No one runs Keel’s office but Terry Keel.”
This article appears in October 18 • 1996 and October 18 • 1996 (Cover).