This has not been a good year for Texas’s top cop. We’re not talking about Attorney General Ken Paxton who may soon face trial for securities fraud, instead it’s a reference to the head of the gun-toting arm of state government, Colonel Steve McCraw of the Department of Public Safety. For the colonel it’s hard to imagine a more problematic short span of time. In fact it’s hard to imagine a worse run of a few months for any bureaucrat, much less one who’s supposed to be enforcing the laws of this Lone Star State. The hot seat has been so hot that Steve McCraw’s pants are literally on fire—as in liar, liar.
The colonel’s troubles hit in a wave. There was the Sandra Bland suicide in Waller County, a tragedy which gained worldwide attention and that, in all fairness to the colonel, is related to the Department’s longstanding race and gender issues which pre-date Steve McCraw’s arrival on the scene. Of the two prior colonels running DPS, one white male and one black, both left after gender issues: one for inappropriate behavior with a subordinate and the second colonel, who called out the first in an “intervention” in the DPS headquarters suite, for retaliating against a secretary in a field office who complained that a Highway Patrol sergeant showed his penis to her, unprompted, at work. The State of Texas had to pay the lady off ($80,000 sticks in mind) after courts ruled that the original accusation of whipping out Mr. Johnson was un-provable but the retaliation by the colonel was not. It was at that point more or less that Steve McCraw, former state trooper and FBI agent, from Marathon in far fucking West Texas, rode to the Department’s rescue. He is the new colonel in town, literally. And recently under his leadership the Department has gone from bad to worse. Let's see.
There have been the well-documented complaints by legal Texas residents in South Texas that they have been stopped multiple times by DPS troopers as part of the “surge”—a policy of increased immigration enforcement brought to you by state leadership and directed by Col. McCraw, for bad or for good. More serious is the recent revelation by television station KXAN that state troopers have been doctoring their racial profiling data by describing, in their reports, Latinos whom they have stopped as white, which technically, apparently, is true but not general usage. The effect is to make it seem that the Department is pulling over fewer minorities than the higher factual number. “I can assure you this is a leadership issue, not a trooper issue,” McCraw recently told Texas lawmakers, taking the hit and falling back on contrition—and then proceeding to blame patrol car computers. Software defects now serve as the bureaucratic scapegoat of choice throughout government, not that there's anything wrong with that, but are computer glitches the real issue? The Dallas Morning News which is no bleeding-heart liberal rag recently noted that DPS has had to destroy 2 million full sets of fingerprints of individuals seeking driver’s licenses—complete sets which were taken instead of the legislatively-permitted mere thumbprint—it’s unclear that this kind of information, once collected, can ever really be “destroyed.” Now another issue has arisen at DPS headquarters in the Live Music Capital of the World. On the surface it may appear good for the Department of Public Safety, and for the colonel, that Steve McCraw has shown restraint, an uncommon virtue at the Department, and, in that respect, shown good stewardship of our civil liberties as well. But if you look a little deeper it's clear that the puercos are in the shit again.
Among DPS’s various tools of enforcement, state troopers (not completely unlike storm troopers) can club you, cuff you, shoot you, shock you or merely take you to jail. In the State of Texas they can also eavesdrop on you although the difference between wiretapping and other interventions is that this wiretapping has to be approved and signed off by the commanding colonel of DPS, Steve McCraw himself. To set the scene. The Texas state wiretapping statute unlike its federal counterpart and unlike the law in some other states, is very limited. It does not permit eavesdropping in political corruption cases for example—and must be requested by a district attorney, somewhere among the 254 counties of the Lone Star State, approved by the colonel and the wire hung and administered by DPS. To set the scene again. What’s interesting is that just a couple of years ago the state’s total of wires requested by local D.A.s was about a dozen yearly and growing. For the last two years DPS reports there have only been three or four approved, depending on how you do the count. It’s not because there’s less drug trafficking in Texas, mind you, meth is still an epidemic here as elsewhere. The notion that any law enforcement agency is actually wiretapping less in this day and age is exceptional, and especially in Texas where cops like their tools to fight crime and have so much to deal with. In the last yearly summary by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which reports on state and federal wiretapping activity, the single most active area of the country for wiretapping by the feds was the single federal district that comprises the state of Arizona. But if you look at the four federal districts that make up Texas the amount of activity in total outstrips any other state and especially for the crime which leads to most government eavesdropping in the first place, narcotics.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Antonio alone—one of four in the state—has hung more wire than AT&T.
Why the sudden reluctance to follow suit by DPS, which was increasing its interceptions until just recently? The reason may be the colonel’s signature. Steve McCraw can’t claim he’s out of the loop on this one. He can’t blame the software. He has to sign off on those D.A. requests and the last time the state figures were made public, two years ago, it was clear that some of the D.A.’s offices asking for wires (that McCraw approved) did not know what they were doing. Harris County bugged somebody’s house in a case that went south. The Tarrant County D.A. did 2000 intercepts of 100 people for a single conspiracy to commit murder, which in this state is a common crime. Travis County D.A. Rosemary Lehmberg was the frequent flyer of state wiretaps with the most approved by Colonel McCraw. But that was before her after-hours exploits led to the indictment of Governor Perry. Texas D.A.s seemed to like murder investigations for eavesdropping almost as much as for narcotics, which shows a misunderstanding of the intended use of the technology.
The Department of Public Safety is not a hard agency to understand. It's operations are governed by an old white boys club, historically, and includes both the Texas Rangers and the Texas Highway Patrol. A few years ago a president of the Austin police union, deflecting criticism of the white male culture of his own force, described DPS as “the ultimate old boys club” and in many ways he's right. Bubba has lived and prospered at DPS through decades—since the inception of the agency, circa Bonnie & Clyde. At DPS, the Old White Boys culture has successfully fought any attempt to dislodge the white rural male ethos. Although even Bubba may soon have trouble resisting demographic changes in the state and the empowerment of women. Still he tries. Two legislative sessions ago an aide to a powerful female Texas House of Representatives member mentioned that his boss was offended by a Highway Patrol supervisor carrying on an open affair with a married employee in a county courthouse, in the legislator’s district, in a small-town in East Texas. The legislator contacted DPS to complain and was told, basically, to piss off. Bubba has his perks, apparently. Left to its own devices the Texas Department of Public Safety divides up power between the old boys just like a damn cake.
If you look at all the gun-carrying certified law enforcement officers side of the agency (some 4,000 strong) and divide the badges between those who wear uniforms, like the Highway Patrol, and those who wear suits, like criminal investigation or criminal intelligence or the fabled Texas Rangers. The top slot—the colonel’s position—historically rotates between the two halves, one colonel coming from the suits, the next one from uniforms, with the Rangers, who are also part of DPS, out of the mix, presumably because they are already powerful enough. The status quo is maintained through a very neat administrative trick. When a DPS officer retires, whether he is a Ranger or a trooper, he or she can appear before the Public Safety Commission to be declared a “Special Ranger” or “Special Texas Ranger,” a retirement status that allows the former officer to continue to carry a gun and a badge and to tap into the lucrative private security industry, as a second retirement income. The Public Safety Commission members usually do not know the retiring officers, whom they must vote upon, and rely almost exclusively on recommendations by the colonels. Any trooper or investigator or Ranger who has rocked the boat during his or her tenure is blackballed from Special Ranger status. All police agencies are military in structure, basically—which means there’s little dissent tolerated in the first place—but DPS goes a step farther to insure orthodoxy. And silence.
Interestingly, a former Democratic candidate for governor mentioned once that the single most important appointments for any new Texas governor are the members of the Public Safety Commission that runs DPS. The reason is easy to rationalize politically, making sure that state investigators, especially the Rangers, don’t stick their noses into areas that Capitol leadership prefers unexamined. The Department is almost wholly-occupied with violent crime and the occasional political corruption case, usually involving a rural county commissioner’s court, while white collar crime, which might involve big donors, and big corruption cases—which might involve state officeholders—are usually forced on the Rangers but are not something they go looking for. Control of DPS and of the Texas Rangers officially has been exercised by means the five-member Public Safety Commission, which chooses the colonel, and who he answers to, but the governor has tapped his guy more or less directly in recent years, for example in 1979 when new Republican governor Bill Clements ignored the uniform-suit rotation/promoting-from-within routine, and instead chose the FBI’s former number two guy, a Texan, Jim Adams as colonel.
Rick Perry did something similar thirty years later, although in the case of Gov. Perry—“Mr. Opportunity” as he is known for his ability to exploit any opening—disarray at the Department was justification to put Governor Perry's man in the top slot. But Perry's first colonel took a fall chasing his secretary around the office. Literally. Perry's next choice was Steve McCraw and that’s where things already stood two legislative sessions ago when SB 162 was signed into law by Gov. Perry.
The so-called "Chris Kyle bill," named after the "American Sniper," was a step that will completely change DPS as we know it, but without going through the five-member Public Safety Commission. By influencing who works at the agency instead. The House sponsor was Rep. Dan Flynn who also serves as commander of Texas’s maritime forces, whatever those are, but the Senate sponsor was Democrat Leticia Van de Putte, a Democrat, who represented San Antonio and its large military community. The paramilitarization of DPS is already clear from the comments of the Legislative Budget Board analyst responsible for presenting the DPS budget to the House Appropriations Committee, earlier this year. “The agency’s self-ranking of programs in several cases,” the LBB analyst told legislators, “did not clearly correlate with the centrality of the agency’s mission. For example the agency ranked counterterrorism and polygraph higher [in importance] than traffic enforcement.”
In an age of terror, it’s clear that even police forces must have a counterterrorism capability. NYPD for example has hundreds of officers so assigned and is said even to post intelligence people abroad. DPS has never been lacking in SWAT or rapid response abilities. If Col. McCraw is de-emphasizing standard traffic enforcement, which still kills far more Texans than terrorism, maybe he needs to tell the public first. But the only way the Department can achieve its new self-selected mission is by traffic stops, which already showing bias against minorities.
Hispanics being categorized as whites may be supplemented by Muslims being categorized as Hispanics. The profiling can get worse, not better. Whatever the plan, one thing is certain, we need to get McCraw’s signature on something describing exactly what the Department is doing, because even in an age of terror there's no substitute for accountability.
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