The Austin Police Department continues to pursue a proposal that would allow the city of Austin to control the process around the first hearing an arrested person faces – despite concerns from criminal court judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and now the Public Defender’s Office.
Travis County Chief Public Defender Adeola Ogunkeyede offered sharp criticism of APD’s still mostly undefined proposal at a Public Safety Commission meeting on Monday, Jan. 8. “The entire Travis County community deserves better than the APD virtual magistration pilot,” Ogunkeyede began, referring to magistration, the initial hearing that determines whether there’s probable cause to keep someone in jail and sets their bail. “What APD is proposing is allowing the city to circumvent some very real legal and critical processes … for savings that seem illusory at this point and have not been detailed in any measure that is reliable and trustworthy.”
APD Assistant Chief Jeff Greenwalt also attended the PSC meeting, where he mostly rehashed APD’s motivations for pursuing the proposal – it would save the city money and get officers back on the streets faster after making an arrest, they have said – but also said the initial scope of the proposal has narrowed. (The PSC intended to vote on a recommendation for City Council to “permanently table” the APD pilot, but commissioners postponed that vote because they were not aware APD had changed the scope.)
Greenwalt said (as we reported Dec. 19) APD would test the proposal through a “mock trial,” where an APD officer would “arrest” another officer and take them through the still-undefined city-run process to see if it works. That will happen sometime in the next few months; then, the plan is to launch an actual pilot. The Chronicle asked to observe a mock hearing and APD declined.
“When we first started we didn’t realize the magnitude of the project. Not to say that it’s going to stop us, we just have more to investigate before we figure out the next step.” – APD Assistant Chief Jeff Greenwalt
Two of the legal processes Ogunkeyede said would be jeopardized by the APD proposal include counsel at first appearance (CAFA) – a program the city and county both support that would provide legal representation to everyone – and prosecutorial arrest review (also known as early case review), which aims to keep people out of jail who were arrested under charges prosecutors do not intend to pursue.
A new attempt at CAFA is unlikely to start this year. Arrest review is already in place at the Travis County and district attorneys’ offices. Some stakeholders have suspected one of APD’s motivations has been getting around arrest review, though APD has denied that (in September, Greenwalt called that suspicion “completely untruthful”).
Allowing APD officers to circumvent arrest review will be a consequence of the program, Greenwalt acknowledged at the PSC meeting. “We do not intend on including the arrest review process in this particular trial.” In October, APD reassigned the detectives that help prosecutors review arrest affidavits and replaced them with less-experienced sergeants – a decision that some stakeholders speculated could be a minor act of subterfuge intended to weaken arrest review. Greenwalt denied this via email Nov. 11, saying, “We would never just place people into a position without the proper training,” and that the decision was purely to help fill patrol shifts amid the department’s officer shortage.
Greenwalt also insisted that APD would provide the same pretrial services that the county currently performs with the city footing the bill, and that the city taking over will save money.
About the overall scope of APD’s plan – and, perhaps, a signal of how it may proceed – Greenwalt admitted that the department may have put the cart before the horse. “When we first started we didn’t realize the magnitude of the project,” Greenwalt said late in the meeting. “Not to say that it’s going to stop us, we just have more to investigate before we figure out the next step.”
This article appears in January 12 • 2024.