DA’s police reform effort gets heated in Texas
TAUSTIN, Texas ravis County District Attorney José Garza was at home when he got a call from one of his prosecutors, Dexter Gilford. A grand jury had just indicted two Austin police officers, charging them with aggravated assault in connection with the beating and hospitalization of an unarmed Black man during a drug arrest in 2019.
Garza hadn’t even been district attorney for three weeks.
The indictments of Chance Bretches and Gregory Gentry that evening in January came years after the police department had cleared them of wrongdoing. They were still patrolling the streets. Now, felony warrants would be issued for their arrest. Gilford asked Garza: Should he call Austin’s chief of police to give him a heads-up?
It was not a trivial decision. Garza needed to work with police to keep the community safe, and a courtesy phone call could help maintain a crucial relationship that was already tense. On the other hand, Garza had promised voters a far more aggressive approach than his predecessor’s in holding officers to account.
“Is there any other employer in the county to whom we would give a heads-up call if their employee was indicted?” Garza asked Gilford.
Gilford couldn’t think of anyone. Garza made up his mind. There would be no call.
When the indictments became public the next day, the backlash from police was swift. Police Chief Brian Manley said he learned of the charges from social media and defended the officers in a news release, saying that the man resisted their attempts to restrain and arrest him. The Austin police union accused Garza of using officers as pawns in a “delusional game of political chess.” Three weeks later, Manley abruptly retired, saying it was time to move on.
Garza had no experience as a prosecutor when he was elected last year in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody and nationwide protests against police. He promised to end the overprosecution of the poor and people of color.
Since he was sworn in Jan. 1, his office has obtained indictments of five Austin police officers, two county deputies, an assistant county attorney and a sheriff on charges including tampering with evidence and murder.
His office is also prosecuting three additional officers who were indicted during the prior district attorney’s administration. And in many other criminal cases, he has sought sentences that emphasize rehabilitation over punishment.
Those efforts have fueled one of the most heated showdowns playing out nationwide between police and prosecutors who have vowed to overhaul the criminal justice system, from San Francisco to Chicago to Baltimore. Those prosecutors have come under pointed criticism as violent crime has risen nationwide. San Francisco’s top prosecutor is facing a recall election after securing indictments of three police officers. In St. Louis, the prosecutor accused the police union in a lawsuit of interfering with her reform efforts.
Garza gave the Washington Post a rare look inside his office during the first year of his administration. He allowed a reporter to attend weekly leadership team meetings and to conduct regular interviews with his top executives, on the condition that the publication of any quotes from those exchanges would be delayed for at least several months. In many instances, the Post agreed not to disclose conversations about topics including office politics and personnel matters. The Post also periodically interviewed Austin police leaders and officers, the local police union president and attorneys for the indicted officers.
None of the officers has gone to trial. One Austin police officer, indicted in early January on a felony charge of misusing official information, declined to comment, his attorneys said. Through their attorneys, the rest have all denied the charges against them.
The tension and distrust between Garza and Austin police has damaged their working relationship, according to interviews and documents. Both offices have feuded over what should happen to people arrested on minor charges and clashed publicly over the handling of two high-profile murder investigations.
Within Garza’s office, which includes 100 attorneys, his approach has triggered strife about whether he is going too far, too fast. Nineteen prosecutors have resigned, documents show, in many cases disagreeing openly with the level and pace of change. Garza has fired a handful for alleged misconduct. He said that his office is in the midst of a “significant cultural change” but that other like-minded district attorneys have faced greater turnover.
The police union and some local activists say Garza’s agenda jeopardizes the safety of 1 million Austinites, pointing out that the annual homicide count — nearly 90 so far this year — is higher than it has been in decades.
Supporters of Garza note that the increase is homicides is not unique to Austin and say that in the city, an influx of guns and strained community relations with police are to blame. They say that Garza is doing more to hold police accountable and reform the criminal justice system than any other prosecutor in the nation and that the public is behind him, also noting that Austin voters recently rejected a proposal to hire hundreds of additional officers.
One year into his four-year term, Garza said he is not distracted by his critics and is committed to his agenda.
“We know that there is obviously a sizable part of the voting populace that wanted him,” said Joseph Parker, a lawyer and pastor at a Black church in East Austin. “Does it really reflect where we are? ... Is José Garza an aberration? Or is he in line with the Austin community and the people he’s been elected to serve?”
Ready for reform
To some, Garza’s election was a vote of no confidence in how his predecessor, Margaret Moore, had dealt with alleged misconduct by police.
When Moore became district attorney in 2017, the public’s faith in police was fraying. A police officer who shot a naked and unarmed Black teenager the previous year had not been charged — raising “legitimate questions about whether prosecutors are up to the task of holding law enforcement accountable,” the Austin American-Statesman wrote in editorial at the time.
Moore promised to draw a hard line on police misconduct. She created a Civil Rights Unit to investigate such allegations and hired Gilford, a respected local defense attorney and former professor of criminal justice who also has deep ties to Austin’s Black community. She also gave Gilford substantial authority to seek indictments of police officers before grand juries.
At the same time, Moore built close relationships with police. She convened monthly meetings over breakfast at the downtown Thistle Cafe with the Austin police chief; the Travis County sheriff; and the county attorney, whose office handles misdemeanor prosecutions.
Those ties were crucial during major public safety crises, including bombings in 2018 that killed two people and injured several others. But by the time Moore was up for reelection, there was a perception that she was unwilling to stand up to police.
Although Austin police fatally shot 15 people during Moore’s four years in office, she took almost none of the killings to a grand jury. Her office instead published “declination” letters, which offered details of the fatal shootings but disappointed many activists. One case she declined to prosecute, the killing of a 20-year-old Latino man who was suffering from a mental health crisis, recently led to a $2.25 million civil settlement. He was holding a BB gun that police said they believed to be a real firearm.
Moore’s office did obtain indictments for three Austin police officers — more than her predecessor — for allegedly using excessive force in nonfatal incidents, but she won no convictions. One officer’s charge is still pending, and a jury acquitted the other two in a joint trial.
When Garza announced that he would challenge Moore’s reelection, no one saw it coming. Both hailed from a long line of Texans and are avid guitar players, but in most other ways are opposites. Moore, whose father was a prosecutor and then a defense attorney, was elected Travis County district attorney just before turning 70. She had a long history in local Democratic politics, serving as Travis county attorney decades earlier and later as a county commissioner.
The son of a civil rights lawyer, Garza was 39 when he launched his campaign. He was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and had never been a prosecutor or sought any other public office. He had worked as a public defender on the Texas-Mexico border, and, most recently, he led an advocacy group for migrant construction workers.
Garza, who is Latino and often peppers his speech with wonky and academic terms, described Travis County’s criminal justice system as “broken.” Moore had acknowledged a need to address racial disparities but was more restrained than Garza.
During a campaign forum in February 2020, Moore, who is white, asked the audience: “Does anybody here think this is a community that … sticks people in jail because they are brown? Or Black?” Several people shouted: “Yes!” The city had recently published a report detailing a growing racial disparity in traffic stops, and local news reports had just revealed allegations that an assistant Austin police chief regularly used racial slurs.
The next month, Garza narrowly defeated Moore in the Democratic primary election, forcing her to a runoff. He’d gained support with his promises to end prosecution of low-level drug crimes, reform the cash bail system and improve treatment of sexual assault victims. But his calls to hold police to account boosted his campaign significantly — especially after Officer Christopher Taylor of the Austin police shot and killed a Latino man named Michael Ramos on April 24, 2020.
The deadly encounter began with a 911 call claiming that Ramos, 42, was holding a gun to a woman’s head in a parked car in southeast Austin. When police arrived, Ramos stepped out of the vehicle with his hands up. After a few minutes, he got back into his car and began to drive. Taylor, who was standing to the side, said he feared Ramos would use the car as a deadly weapon against other officers and fired into it, killing Ramos. Police later said they found no gun in Ramos’ car. It was Taylor’s second fatal shooting on duty: Nine months earlier, he and fellow Officer Karl Krycia had shot Mauris DeSilva, a Sri Lankan man who was holding a knife while experiencing a mental health crisis.
A push for change
The fatal shooting of Ramos and the killing of Floyd by police in Minneapolis a month later ignited in Austin some of the nation’s most heated clashes between protesters and police. Over the last two days of May 2020, Austin police seriously injured more than a dozen protesters with “beanbag munitions” promoted as nonlethal force.
A week later, the Statesman revealed a video of sheriff’s deputies from neighboring Williamson County repeatedly shocking an unarmed Black man, Javier Ambler, with a Taser as he insisted, “I can’t breathe.” Ambler, who was 40, died during the encounter. Deputies said they had tried to pull Ambler’s car over but that he fled and eventually crashed. They said he then refused their commands to get on the ground. The incident occurred in Travis County in March 2019, but Moore’s office had yet to take any public action.
“In the last four years, not one officer has been charged with a crime for killing a member of our community, and not one officer has been convicted of a crime for any misconduct,” Garza told the Statesman in July 2020. He vowed that, unlike Moore, he would present every instance of an officer-involved shooting or other allegations of excessive force to a grand jury to “let the community decide” if there was probable cause for charges.
Moore said she planned to take the Ramos shooting to a grand jury but had been delayed by the pandemic. “That was not a difficult decision, because he was unarmed,” Moore recalled recently.
That July, Garza trounced Moore with 68 percent of the vote in the runoff election. Critics noted that liberal billionaire George Soros, a well-known supporter of “progressive prosecutor” candidates nationwide, poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Garza’s campaign. Garza downplayed the donation, saying the money came long after his grassroots effort had attracted tens of thousands of new voters.
For many in law enforcement, Garza’s win was an existential threat.
“The public just voted to put in someone to the district attorney’s office that ran on prosecuting police and not prosecuting drug crimes, or hardly any other crimes,” Austin Police Association President Ken Casaday told the local Fox News affiliate at the time. “They don’t want an active police department. ... What I’m telling my guys is, ‘Answer your calls and that is it.’ ” Casaday later reflected in an interview: “Was that the smartest thing to say? Probably not.”
A month after the election, officers again felt under attack when the Austin City Council imposed its own take on the “defund the police” movement. The council voted to reallocate more than $100 million from the police department to other public safety programs.
Given the election results and the pandemic, Moore decided to leave the Ramos case to Garza — along with dozens of other pending cases of officer-involved shootings or other allegations of excessive force that her office was still mulling over.
In an interview, she said her administration laid the foundation for Garza’s work toward police reform. She noted that despite Garza’s criticism of her for not indicting officers, he chose to keep Dexter Gilford as the office’s civil rights chief.
“We were unafraid of prosecution of police officers,” she said. “But the law of justification is a formidable obstacle.”
But Moore said she would have handled the January indictments against officers Bretches and Gentry differently: She would have called Chief Manley to let him know, “You need to know this because you’re gonna be asked about it. … I know that that’s gonna put you in an uncomfortable place.”
Manley said later in an interview that he was surprised by the indictments and had been under the impression that the case was not going to be presented to a grand jury. He acknowledged that his departure was “abrupt” but said that after 30 years with the department, he had been thinking for some time of retiring.
“At some point, you leave,” he said. In retrospect, Garza said, a courtesy call would have been a good idea. “Giving them a heads-up is a small, good-faith step I can take.”
“You know,” he said, “I’m learning.”