AUSTIN — The head of the state police is disputing allegations of racial profiling in Operation Lone Star traffic stops and of coziness with white nationalists who flocked to the Texas-Mexico border last year.
Col. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, also is disputing claims by the ACLU of Texas and the Texas Civil Rights Project that DPS officers have little guidance on when to chase fleeing vehicles. High-speed pursuits near the border have caused 30 deaths since Operation Lone Star began 18 months ago, according to the two civil rights groups.
In a Sept. 1 letter to the groups, McCraw said that “ideally,” helicopter overflights and unspecified “new technology” that allows DPS to attach tracking devices to vehicles will reduce the need for vehicle pursuits.
Civil rights groups are misdirecting their indignation at DPS for roadside carnage when the real culprit is Mexican cartels, which are instructing drivers they hire to transport migrants to flee when detected, he said.
Operation Lone Star was launched by Gov. Greg Abbott in March 2021. It is an expensive, multi-pronged surge of state troopers and Texas National Guard soldiers at the border.
Under two Republican governors over nearly a decade, the state has groused that federal officials weren’t doing their jobs at immigration enforcement. Texas has poured increasing amounts of state taxpayer money into efforts to discourage undocumented immigrants from entering the state.
Complaints by border county residents about more frequent traffic stops are not new. In 2015 and 2016, The Dallas Morning News reported on how rotating state troopers into border regions was reducing traffic enforcement elsewhere and irritating border residents.
Over a 22-month period after DPS surged traffic enforcement The News found more than 600 people in Starr and Hidalgo counties were stopped 10 or more times. More than 300 were stopped at least 20 times. One person was pulled over 52 times in that time period.
On the recent accusations of racial profiling, McCraw insisted DPS has “some of the most robust internal controls in the nation” to prevent the practice, such as in-car cameras, body cameras and independent investigations by the police agency’s inspector general.
“DPS officers exercise great discretion when conducting traffic stops, and they issue on average three warnings for every one citation when conducting stops in South Texas,” he wrote in response to the two civil rights groups’ July 28 letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Stops, searches, contraband
In June, though, a Tarleton State University research team that conducted a state-imposed review of 2021 traffic stops found “concerning” data. Racial profiling may sway state highway patrol officers to excessively pull over Hispanic motorists and subject them to searches, the Stephenville school’s Institute for Predictive Analytics in Criminal Justice said in an annual report of Hispanic-driver findings.
McCraw said the institute’s June report “failed to account for essential data.” Last year, DPS officers had lower “contraband hit rates” – or lower frequency for searches to yield illicit objects – when they searched Latinos’ vehicles than when they searched whites’, the report said.
McCraw complained that the “contraband hits” statistics provided by a state peace officer accrediting agency don’t count smuggled humans as contraband – and thus suppress the hit rates for Hispanic drivers’ vehicles.
A low rate of finding contraband, combined with a high rate of stopping and searching vehicles operated by Black or Hispanic motorists, is a red flag that racial profiling may be occuring, Alex del Carmen, a criminologist who heads the Tarleton unit, has said.
Last month, McCraw wrote del Carmen and cited several recent border incidents in which vehicle searches “result(ed) in the discovery of suspected illegal migrants and the arrest of drivers for human smuggling.”
Asked this week if he affirms his group’s finding, despite the DPS director’s criticism, del Carmen said he does.
“We stand by our research findings,” del Carmen said. “We also reached out to DPS and offered to assist them in further analysis of their data.”
Representatives of the two civil rights groups that asked for a civil rights investigation of DPS also stood by their allegations. In addition to the Tarleton study, the groups noted that they used DPS’s own probable cause affidavits and independent sources to buttress their allegations.
“We detailed evidence of discrimination by DPS officers and who they target for enforcement,” ACLU staff attorney Kate Huddleston said in an interview Thursday. “The probable cause affidavits indicate that DPS officers are targeting for enforcement people who are Latinx. In those affidavits, essentially, the only provided justification for extending a stop is seeing a lot of passengers in the vehicle. … We can see in these probable cause affidavits the agency is singling out for further investigation … people on the basis of their perceived race or ethnicity.”
The groups examined 18 affidavits from vehicle stops in Kinney and Val Verde counties, most involving relatively minor traffic offenses, such as having temporary tags that were unreadable or failing to dim headlights. Some of the stops were prolonged because troopers spotted items such as backpacks, Huddleston noted. A lengthy stop based on such a pretext is unconstitutional, she said.
One DPS officer’s affidavit said, “I smelled an odor that was emitting from inside the vehicle. … Undocumented aliens emit a distinct odor due to sweat and being exposed to the environment.”
Texas Civil Rights Project spokeswoman Savannah Tarbet said Operation Lone Star inflicts harm on border communities.
“This correspondence represents further attempts by DPS to shape the narrative away from its own wrongdoing at the border and beyond,” she said of McCraw’s letter.
McCraw said the 18 stops have been referred by DPS administration to the department’s inspector general, Phillip Ayalla, who has begun to investigate. McCraw also said he’s commissioned a separate academic study of whether DPS has racially profiled motorists.
White nationalist ties disputed
He denied assertions that DPS is friendly with and has ties to North Texas white supremacist group leader Lucas “Rooster” Denney.
Denney, of Mansfield, president of Patriot Boys, a Fort Worth militia group, is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 28 in Washington, D.C., on assault charges for fighting with police defending the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. As a fugitive wanted by the FBI, he had an extensive stay in Kinney County last year.
In July, Texas Monthly quoted a lawyer for Denney as saying that last December, a DPS officer who was a friend of Denney’s drove him from a Kinney County ranch to Del Rio so he could turn himself over to the FBI.
“The allegations against this DPS officer are false,” McCraw wrote. “He was neither a friend or acquaintance of the subject” but showed “great initiative” in using intermediaries to arrange for Denney to voluntarily turn himself in, McCraw said. He did not elaborate.
Around the same time, in a separate incident, a DPS officer made a traffic stop in Kinney County and arrested an unnamed “militia member” for felon in possession of a firearm, McCraw noted.