Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Unfounded complaints against police, jailers would be secret in Texas. Is that OK?

SB 781 and its companion bill HB 2486 would compel law enforcement agencies to create a “department file” for each officer that would contain reports of misconduct “for which the agency determines there is insufficient evidence to sustain the charge of misconduct.”

The bills exempt an officer’s department file from being released “to any other agency or person” under the Texas Public Information Act with two exceptions. The file can be viewed by another law enforcement agency looking to hire an officer or by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement when it is investigating an officer. But an outside agency such as the Texas Rangers would not have access to unsubstantiated claims of misconduct by jailers when investigating a death in the Tarrant County jail.

Krishnaveni Gundu of the advocacy group Texas Jail Project called the bills an “erosion of transparency and oversight, what little we have.”

The threshold for substantiating complaints against jailers is high due to the public’s reluctance to believe incarcerated people, she said. “It’s very, very hard for complaints and grievances to be founded, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not useful to have access to the files where you can see a pattern of complaints in the past,” she said.

This model discourages agencies from disciplining officers in order to keep such records sealed.