Reforms changing how Texas law enforcement operate

Editor’s Note: The video above shows coverage from when the governor signed the TCOLE bill into law.

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Following years of review — and an assessment that the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement was “toothless” — lawmakers passed wide-ranging changes to the police licensing agency in 2023. Now, just over a year since the bill was signed into law, the impacts of the TCOLE revamp are taking form and rippling out to law enforcement agencies across the state.

TCOLE oversees the licensing of all peace officers, jailers and law enforcement telecommunicators in Texas, and the new law has granted it new responsibilities. The reforms to the agency are the result of repeated Sunset Advisory Commission audits and recommendations that culminated in Senate Bill 1445 in 2023.

With input from advisory committees composed of law enforcement officials and experts from across the state, TCOLE has created several model policies, including rules for misconduct investigations, conducting background checks on officers and examining their mental and physical fitness for duty. Moving forward, law enforcement departments across the state will be adopting those policies or “substantially similar” ones.

Jennifer Szimanski, the deputy executive director of Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, expects the changes to improve law enforcement in the state. With more than 27,000 members, CLEAT is a powerful police union that was closely involved in the bill’s passage. CLEAT’s leaders have held positions on TCOLE’s policy advisory committees.

We are “hopeful that the bill itself and the policies that resulted from the bill are raising professional standards,” Szimanski told KXAN. “That was the goal for CLEAT in the process.”

Law enforcement agencies had a deadline of Sept. 1, 2024, to adopt policies for medical and psychological exams for licensees. Three other sets of policies — for handing misconduct allegations, hiring procedures and keeping personnel files — have an adoption deadline of June 1, 2025, according to TCOLE.

Wandering officers

Luis Soberon, senior policy advisor for justice and safety with Texas 2036, studied the TCOLE sunset process and helped author the group’s expansive findings and recommendations in a 200-page report: Texas Law Enforcement Data Landscape. The nonpartisan policy outfit released that report in late 2022, ahead of the last legislative session.

In that report, Texas 2036 dug into the phenomenon of “wandering officers” and recommended new rules to reduce the number of them. The term “wandering officers” refers to police who are fired for misconduct and then rehired by a different agency.

“If serious acts of peace officer misconduct are committed by an officer who was previously disciplined or sanctioned by another (department), the credibility of the second hiring agency is called into doubt with profession-wide repercussions,” according to Texas 2036’s report. “Across Texas, stories of rehired wandering officers engaging in misconduct are unfortunately common.”

Texas 2036 recommended the reforming the F-5 form used to categorize officer discharges from employment and creating a uniform system for retaining officer information and making it available to hiring agencies.

To improve the quality of Texas’ police forces, the senate bill directs TCOLE to craft policies for background checks in the hiring process, misconduct allegations and maintaining a database of personnel files.

Outside of model policies, the bill also addressed the F-5 form.

The F-5 form has three categories for separations: honorable, general and dishonorable. A separation below honorable could be appealed, and an officer could upgrade their status and clean up their record, if they prevailed.

An analysis by Texas 2036 found 60% of officers who earned a status upgrade had won by default, meaning no one from their former department showed up to the hearing to defend their decision.

Gretchen Grigsby, director of government relations with TCOLE, confirmed the F-5 has been amended to remove the three separation categories.

However, the latest model policies for misconduct investigations and providing personnel files to TCOLE aren’t required to be adopted until June 2025.

“The effect is that, for now, we’re left with a version of the status quo in dealing with wandering officers. We don’t have the deeply flawed F-5s, and we don’t really have the improved policies, but local agencies are still required to do in-depth pre-hiring background investigations of any applicant,” Soberon said in a statement to KXAN. “Looking forward, we’ll have a more robust system for handling wandering officers once local agencies adopt new and improved policies for record keeping, hiring and dealing with misconduct.”

Grigsby said her agency is in the process of building an online system that law enforcement offices will use to send misconduct reports and check officer misconduct. They anticipate completion in early 2025.

“Personnel files that should include any departmental discipline have been required to be shared between hiring law enforcement agencies and previous employing law enforcement agencies for some time, and the TCOLE SecureShare system that has been in place since 2022 … was designed to facilitate that.”

Szimanski also said rules for backgrounding law enforcement applicants have been in place since lawmakers passed Senate Bill 24 in 2021. That bill “requires law enforcement agencies to review basic background information on applicants during the hiring process, including the applicant’s personnel file at any previous law enforcement agency. Upon completion, the hiring agency must certify to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE) that it has reviewed the required information,” according to a House analysis of the bill.

“TCOLE can actually see whether or not they reviewed (an applicant) or not, so there is accountability there in terms of, you know, was the separation information reviewed prior to them being hired by another agency,” Szimanski said.

The F-5 was only meant to be a starting point for a background investigations, and the process has been shored up through legislation and the development of SecureShare, said Grigsby.

“It has always been the chief administrator’s obligation, and in their best interest, to get a full understanding of who they are hiring,” Grigsby said. “We know, because we hear from them, that chief administrators are asking deeper questions when making hiring decisions, even though the hiring procedures mandates are not yet fully in effect.”

Public-facing database

In early September, TCOLE released its online public database of licensed peace officers, jailers and telecommunicators. TCOLE’s executive director Greg Stevens called it a “important way that TCOLE can support that transparency.”

The database, which anyone can search after creating a profile through TCOLE’s website, provides licensing information for all current and former licensees. The data includes previous locations a person has worked, as well as training and education history. You can search the database here.

The database brings law enforcement more in line with other professions in the state, like doctors, engineers, nurses and dozens of others with licenses that are searchable in a public portal.

Before the database went live, the information was public but required an official public information act request to TCOLE.

Department standards

On June 1, standards for the formation of new police departments also went into effect. The benchmarks apply to the creation of new departments and will apply to existing ones.

The standards require equipment like firearms, less than lethal weapons, radio communication devices, bullet proof vests and uniforms for officers on duty. Departments must also have policies for use of force, vehicle pursuits and professional conduct, as well as requirements for physical resources like evidence lockers and dispatch areas for agencies with telecommunicators, according to the law.

The standards took effect for new departments formed after June 1. For departments that already existed by that date, the new rules are effective Sept. 1, 2025.

Law enforcement officials had been sounding the alarm for years on the ever-growing number of police departments in Texas and the lack of control over their formation.

Chambers County Sheriff Brian Hawthorne told lawmakers at a December 2022 hearing that the state needed to “get a grip on the creation of law enforcement agencies.”

“We don’t need to be creating one- and two-man police departments,” he said.

At that time, Texas had over 2,700 law enforcement departments – ranging from single-officer shops to massive agencies like the Harris County Sheriff’s Office with nearly 4,600 employees.

National database crosschecking and fit-for-duty exams

The bill also requires law enforcement agencies to check prospective peace officers’ backgrounds by reviewing a national law enforcement database before hiring and licensing them.

Grigsby said the licensure process, and model policies, now include a check through the National Decertification Index, or NDI. The NDI is a national registry of peace officer license revocations related to officer misconduct. The registry is not available to the general public, and the information is fed in by participating states.

TCOLE and an advisory committee have also created policies for the medical and psychological examination of license holders and applicants. Police departments were supposed to adopt those rules, or similar ones, by Sept. 1, 2024, according to TCOLE’s website.

“The purpose of this policy is to ensure that all members of this agency remain medically and psychologically fit for duty and able to perform their essential job functions,” according to TCOLE.

The fit-for-duty policies recommend law enforcement officers alert a supervisor if they see any indication a coworker might be physically or psychologically unable to perform. Indications may include abrupt behavior changes, irrational or hostile behavior, inappropriate use of alcohol or other substances and an inability to manage emotions, among many other factors.

“A fitness-for-duty examination (FFDE) may be ordered whenever circumstances reasonably indicate that a member is unfit for duty,” according to the model policy, which goes on to explain a raft of standards for the examination and the option to appeal.

Grigsby said TCOLE will monitor agencies’ compliance with the new standards through annual reports.