Whipped Cream Difficulties

There are a couple of ongoing stories in the news, two of them locally. Both of those two had significant developments today (in other words, “Let’s break this news on Friday afternoon and see if it gets lost over the weekend.”)

First story: You may recall the controversy back in April where our city manager, Marc Ott, accused the police chief of insubordination and fined him five days of pay?

Looks like we know who won that battle.

Austin City Manager Marc Ott, the most powerful man at City Hall, is leaving his post for a prestigious job running a Washington, D.C., association.

…

Last month, the council gave him a $22,000 raise, bumping his pay and benefits to $361,000 annually. His predecessor at the management association made $478,000 in 2013, the group’s tax returns show.

At least, we know who won for the moment. It will be interesting to see how the replacement process plays out, and how much deference (if any) the incoming city manager will be expected to show to the APD and the chief.

Also worth pointing out is what may have been Ott’s final “F— you” to the APD. There was a recent report (the “Matrix Report”) that called for increasing the number of police officers.

Additionally, the report also calls for the department to create positions for 66 officers and eight corporals beyond what has already been authorized, and to add an average 17 new officer positions over the next four years. Finally, the report calls for adding four officers to the Motorcycle Unit.

So that’s 78 sworn officers over and above the current authorized staffing level, which APD is still about 100 officers short of. What did the City Manager and his team ask for in the current budget?

Currently, the city has taken a phased approach to increasing staffing at APD in FY 2017. Included in the City Manager’s proposed FY 2017 budget are 12 new sworn positions and 21 new civilian positions to transition existing sworn employees back to patrol activities.

Twelve. To quote our great and good friend RoadRich: “‘But first let me deny you most of the required staff to protect the city… and then I shall leave you to your fates. Suckahs.'”

(Another problem which I would like to get into, but the margins of this post are too small to contain: there’s also talk of converting the district representative positions, which are currently sworn officers, into civilian positions.)

Next:

On July 25, a deputy with the Travis County Sheriff’s Department died. He had just returned home after getting off shift, made a radio call to report prowlers, and responding police officers found him with a gunshot wound in his backyard.

There was a little bit of controversy at the time, mostly from people who were upset that their commute was being disrupted. (Local law enforcement closed highways while the officer was being taken to the medical examiner’s office for autopsy, and there were also much more extensive and longer closures of highways for his funeral procession.) People are going to gripe, though, especially if they’re stuck in traffic, no matter how good the cause. What ya gonna do?

Then the first shoe dropped. Forensics showed the deputy was killed by his own weapon. People started going “Hmmmmmm.” But it was entirely possible that he was jumped and had his weapon taken from him and turned on him.

Meanwhile, local law enforcement was rounding up the usual suspects:

…police investigating his death arrested six persons of interest on various unrelated charges after questioning them about the deputy’s shooting. The arrests include one man who was held nine days on $50,000 bail for possession of just under an ounce of marijuana.

…

Nine days later…a judge reduced the bail to $2,000 and the man was released that day.
A second man was arrested July 26 for failing to check in with his probation officer five times after being arrested in 2011 for stealing $104 in food, videos and drinks from an H-E-B Plus store, the records show. His bail was set at $4,000, and he was released three days later.

(Brief note for my non-local readers: while he was a deputy with Travis County, the shooting took place at his home in Williamson County, which is adjacent to Travis. WillCo, as it is sometimes called, has a reputation for being tough on crime, sometimes to the detriment of justice. Ken Anderson was the Williamson County prosecutor who ended up jailed and disbarred for his actions in the Michael Morton case. WillCo has a reputation for being especially tough on crime if you are a minority, though I can’t say for certain if that is supported by statistics.)

The other shoe dropped this afternoon: the deputy’s death has been ruled a suicide. Apparently, he had money problems, and had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression.

A lot of folks are kind of gloating over this. “Ha ha! You shut down traffic for a fallen hero, and it turns out he killed himself!” I’m not one of those people, obviously. I think we’ve already established that I find it sad and awful and tragic when anyone kills themselves (except maybe to escape a chronic medical problem, like a terminal illness; even then, it is still sad and awful but for different reasons). The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255 (273-TALK). There’s also another group, Safe Call Now (206-459-3020) that specializes in helping public safety workers.

But there is something that makes me wonder. The deputy’s wife doesn’t believe he killed himself. Denial is, of course, one of the stages of grief, and it is hard to imagine local law enforcement sweeping an officer’s death under the rug. But:

An autopsy determined [the deputy] was killed by a single gunshot fired from his duty handgun. The bullet went through [the deputy’s] left palm and then went into the left side of his head, Gravell said.

I’m not a crime scene guy, so I’m trying to visualize how this worked. Did he have his hand against his head and shot himself through it? Was he holding his left hand in front of him and shot himself through it? Is it common for suicides to shoot themselves through a hand, as opposed to just applying muzzle directly to forehead?

You know who I really, really miss right now? William the Coroner. Honest to Ghu, I think everyone who knew him misses him even more than I do; but this is a time where I’d love to be able to send him an email and see if he’d be willing to talk this one over.

Last one for the night, and this one isn’t a local story: I suspect most folks have heard about the 73-year-old librarian who was shot and killed while going through a citizen’s police academy. I didn’t comment at first because it seemed to be well-covered, and I didn’t think I had anything to add.

But one thought did occur to me a little while ago: as you may recall, I went through the local version of the citizen’s police academy earlier this year. We had police in the room with us, and going in and out of the room. All the uniformed officers were wearing full duty gear, including their issue weapons. I don’t know about the plainclothes detectives; I didn’t see sidearms, and I didn’t ask.

Point being: nobody ever pulled their freaking duty weapon from the freaking holster. Ever. There wasn’t any reason to. We didn’t play “force on force” or “shoot/don’t shoot” with LIVE FREAKING WEAPONS.

We did do a sort of “shoot/don’t shoot” scenario. But we did that at the police academy. We did that using their simulator – one of those projector screens with a realistic (but still not live) laser training gun. And we did it in a sterile environment with no functioning weapons or live ammunition.

It may be obvious or banal for me to say this now, but: there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this stuff, and the Florida cops did this the wrong way. What the hell were they thinking?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 12th, 2016 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Austin, Cops, Guns, Law, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.