Two years ago, on May 6, Austin voters approved an overhaul of the city’s civilian police oversight system in a landslide election victory. Following years of protests over fatal police shootings and a series of expensive lawsuits over Austin Police Department’s violent response to protesters in 2020, City Council members and justice advocates hailed the measure – known as the Austin Police Oversight Act – as laying the foundation for Austin to establish perhaps the strongest, most robust system for police accountability in the nation.
But implementation has lagged. The struggle to enact the ordinance has played out in City Hall, courtrooms, and the Legislature.
Since voters approved the Oversight Act, City Council has passed a resolution compelling city management to stop dragging their feet and fully implement the ordinance. Justice advocates filed a lawsuit to achieve the same goal, a judge made a historic decision on the secret police misconduct file known as the “G file,” City Council has passed a police contract with oversight measures heavily influenced by the ordinance, and the Texas Legislature has made multiple attempts to pass state law that would trump the local measure.
“Every day this isn’t up and running is another day they are out of compliance with implementing the will of the voters.” – Public Safety Commission Chair Nelly Paulina Ramirez
Still, some of the Oversight Act’s mandates have not been implemented. Last week, the Office of Police Oversight shed some light on the gaps. Also known as OPO, the city agency that oversees officer misconduct investigations at APD published its annual report recapping the agency’s activities. (The 2023 report is more than a year late due to some bureaucratic hurdles, and an OPO spokesperson said the agency expects to release its 2024 report later this fall.)
According to the report, in 2023 OPO received 578 complaints against officers. Only 11 resulted in officers being disciplined. That worked out like this: The OPO looked at all 578 complaints and recommended APD investigate 215 of them. Out of those 215 recommendations, APD investigated 138, and in 11 of those cases officers were disciplined. The largest share of complaints were for “no assistance from APD” at 27% and officers being rude at 23%.
OPO and APD are doing a lot of the work mandated by the Oversight Act: that includes conducting a preliminary review of all complaints against officers, and the OPO spokesperson confirmed that APD is allowing access to records that make investigations possible. But the Oversight Act also directed OPO to make a lot of information public, and the OPO is lagging behind on publishing some of the documents called for. Critically, OPO is supposed to publish the disciplinary recommendation memos they send to APD after completing their investigation into alleged officer misconduct. Between 2023 and 2025, they’ve published only 21 disciplinary recommendations online.
The OPO spokesperson said they are “reviewing past recommendations made by previous directors” and they will publish them “when appropriate,” though they would not say when that might be. OPO staff is also still working through a backlog of complaints made against officers that should be published. All of the publishable complaints from 2022 are online, but only complaints from the first three months of 2023 are available. The spokesperson said the remaining 2023 complaints should be published in the fall of 2025.
Another mandate of the Oversight Act was the creation of the Community Police Review Commission, a board of civilian volunteers tasked with reviewing cases of police violence. The commission exists but has yet to hold its inaugural meeting – though the spokesperson says one has been scheduled for May 16. OPO is also mandated to brief City Council on their activities since 2022, and that hasn’t happened yet.
All of the gaps in fulfilling the Oversight Act have been alarming to Nelly Paulina Ramirez, chair of the Public Safety Commission and one of the advocates who has been pushing the city to act more swiftly to implement the ordinance. “I don’t see any urgency around the Oversight Act,” Ramirez said, “which doesn’t make any sense to me because this was a voter-mandated set of policy changes. Every day this isn’t up and running is another day they are out of compliance with implementing the will of the voters.”
Ramirez also thinks that the 2023 report itself is lacking information that could provide better insight into how misconduct investigations at APD unfold. For example, data shows that complaints from community members (external complaints) were much more likely to receive light discipline than complaints filed by APD officers (internal complaints).
“It sure looks to me like [APD] doesn’t take complaints made by the community as seriously as those made by officers,” Ramirez said. She thinks the OPO should use the annual report – and a briefing before Council – to explain to the public why this may be happening and what the city can do to provide more transparency around investigations into complaints made against officers.
This article appears in May 9 • 2025.