Austin Is a “Stop-and-Frisk” City, Ongoing APD Review Reveals: Kroll report documents ongoing questionable, inequitable policing – News

City Council members were surprised to learn on Jan. 25 that Austin is a “stop-and-frisk” city. The revelation came courtesy of the latest report from Kroll Associates, the consulting firm hired in 2019 to examine racism at the Austin Police Department.

Stop-and-frisk is a controversial police tactic promoted by New York Mayors Rudy Giu­li­ani and Michael Bloomberg in the 1990s and 2000s. The practice stretches the limits of constitutional law by allowing police to search individuals before they are arrested or even suspected of committing a crime. It is typically used against young men of color and is considered a tool of racial profiling.

“Handcuffing involving stop-and-frisk appears to be aggressively employed by some officers in Austin,” Rick Brown, a Kroll researcher with 28 years of experience in law enforcement, told Council. “And they’re not really articulating reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is happening or is beginning to happen.”

This is Kroll’s second report on racism at APD. The first, released last spring, studied Austin’s police academy, concluding that instructors instilled a warrior culture in cadets, teaching them to think of citizens as “the enemy.” The academy has since undertaken a reform of its curricula and training methods. Last Friday, it graduated its first class of new officers in over two years with some, but not all, of the reforms in place.

Kroll’s current report – 176 pages in length – addresses APD’s demographic makeup and promotion practices, but the most eye-opening material examines use of force. As part of their broader research, Brown and his investigators studied 1,321 incident reports submitted by officers between June and November of 2019, including body-camera and dashboard footage. These incident reports detailed 2,960 uses of force, nearly half against Hispanic people, 28% against Black people, and 21% against white people.

“Kroll found that officers’ actions were appropriate in the vast majority of cases,” the report reads, “and we saw many examples of fine, proactive police work, successful de-escalation tactics, and officers making legal arrests.” However, Kroll identified excessive force or needless escalation of conflict in 88 of the 1,321 reports – about one of every 15 encounters. APD officers used force against 21 people experiencing a mental health crisis during the period of study, with 19 of these deemed inappropriate. Officers unnecessarily pointed guns at nine people and put five in illegal chokeholds. Kroll found that police supervisors exercised “extremely limited or nonexistent” review of all uses of force.

In his remarks to Council, Brown cited examples of officers telling citizens they had done nothing wrong but then handcuffing them anyway. “And when the subject asked why or displays uncertainty or tenses up … they’re charged with resisting arrest,” Brown said. This type of charge, known in criminal justice circles as a “cover charge,” is often used to justify a stop-and-frisk.

Officers claimed in their incident reports that stop-and-frisk was necessary to ensure their safety. “APD officers frequently handcuffed individuals citing only officer safety as a justification,” the report reads. “In the problem cases reviewed and highlighted by Kroll, it did not seem to matter if the subject was an 11-year-old girl, a 70-year-old female suffering from dementia, a 67-year-old female suffering from a traumatic brain injury, or a victim of a crime.”

Several Council members were alarmed by Kroll’s findings, particularly Natasha Harper-Madison, who authored the December 2019 resolution (known as Resolution 66) that called for the review Kroll is now conducting. “Frankly, I’m blown away,” she said. “I didn’t realize that Austin was customarily a stop-and-frisk city … If a uniformed officer is afraid for their safety because of an 11-year-old female, then I’d like very much to know more about the circumstances surrounding that.”