by Daniel Johnson
December 7, 2023
Travis County District Legal professional Jose Garza dismissed many of the expenses in opposition to the 21 officers he initially charged with aggravated assault
Travis County District Legal professional Jose Garza dismissed many of the expenses in opposition to the 21 officers he initially charged with aggravated assault associated to their actions in 2020 protests over police brutality and social justice points. The Texas Tribune stories that 17 of the officers had their instances dismissed. As a substitute of prosecuting these officers instantly, Garza’s workplace and the Metropolis of Austin requested that the Division of Justice’s Civil Rights Division step in and evaluate how the police responded to the protests.
Austin Mayor Kirk Watson mentioned, “These bulletins will permit law enforcement officials, whose lives had been upended by the indictments, to return to their providers to our neighborhood,”
Watson continued. “And the request for a focused third-party efficiency evaluate is supposed to boost transparency for our neighborhood and inform future actions as we proceed our give attention to constructing respect and belief for our police.”
Garza defined in an announcement to the Austin-American Statesman that he believed one of the simplest ways to cement systemic change within the police division was by means of an impartial evaluate, saying, “The accountability of our workplace is to hunt simply outcomes,” Garza defined. “In the course of the two-year investigation into the Austin Police Division and the town of Austin and their conduct through the 2020 protest, it turned clear that systemic change is important to ensure this by no means occurs once more in our neighborhood, and one of the simplest ways to realize that consequence, to realize systemic change, is thru an investigation by the Division of Justice.”
Following the April 2020 capturing dying of a Black Latinx man, Michael Ramos, by Austin police officer Christopher Taylor, Ramos turned a part of the town’s protests over the homicide of George Floyd one month later in Could. Garza charged Taylor with homicide, which led to a mistrial in November after the jury disagreed on whether or not or not Taylor murdered Ramos.
Throughout these protests, officers used beanbag rounds and rubber bullets, which resulted in traumatic mind accidents and damaged bones for some protestors. Austin has paid out $18 million in civil lawsuits, with eight extra pending. Since then, the town has stopped utilizing various crowd management strategies and has gone by means of two police chiefs. Garza and Watson requested the federal authorities to carry out a “sample or follow” investigation within the letter. The federal authorities has not but confirmed that they intend to launch an investigation as of Dec 4.
Garza was elected in Austin after he promised to carry the police accountable. Garza remains to be continuing with the prosecution of 4 different officers, and though the indictments have widened the hole between Garza and the police, sometimes, prosecutors and the police get pleasure from a comfy relationship so long as they don’t try to carry the police accountable for misconduct, as evidenced by reporting from the Statesman.
Some officers accused Garza of constructing a political assertion with the indictments and calling him anti-police. Garza has additionally indicated that he’ll pursue expenses in opposition to Taylor once more, though the jury has been deadlocked twice. The Austin Police Division was final investigated by the federal authorities in 2007 after the Texas Civil Rights Venture and the Austin NAACP requested an investigation.
It closed in 2011 after investigators determined there was “no affordable trigger to consider that APD has engaged in a sample or follow that violated the Structure or legal guidelines of the US.”