Auditors from the Texas Department of Public Safety confirmed allegations that the Austin Police Department pressured the head of its sex-crimes unit to improperly classify rapes as "exceptionally cleared" when that was not the case. She was removed from her position when she didn't comply.
Chief Bryan Manley announced the results from the DPS audit late afternoon on New Years Eve, hoping it would get lost in the holiday media cycle. That's a disgraceful, punk move. This is too serious an issue to play media games. UPDATE: ProPublica reported that Manley received the preliminary results from DPS on Dec. 13, more than two weeks before he released them.
As is typical in Austin, the local press downplayed criticisms of APD, portraying the problem as a clerical error. The Statesman headline was, "Austin police improperly classified some rape cases, audit finds." KXAN's headline was, "DPS report: 30 APD rape cases should not have been cleared," although in fact DPS audited just a sample and those 30 cases represent many, many more. KUT parroted the same line, failing to mention that APD forced out its division chief over the issue.
These headlines could/should have been something along the lines of "DPS confirms whistleblower account of inflated rape clearance rates," but the Austin press remains in the pocket of local police and rarely publishes explicit criticisms unless backed into a corner by outside reporting and circumstances.
That's what happened here. Despite local advocates pressuring the department all year over inadequately investigated rape cases, the Austin press didn't cover the story until a podcast from national outlets reported on the whistle blower and bogus clearance rates.
Notably, although the DPS audit released Monday found a third of audited rape cases were misclassified, Manley earlier claimed his own staff had audited the cases and found nothing wrong. The Statesman reported in December that "he asked his staff to do a random audit of cases to ensure they were properly closed. He said they found the department was complying with FBI guidelines."
I'd like to know more about this random audit the Chief supposedly had his own people do. Why did they find zero cases were miscategorized, and DPS found a third of them were? Were these staff incompetent? Or were they given directions designed to cover up the problem instead of expose it? That's the sort of thing an aggressive local press ought to be digging into with open-records requests, but Grits won't hold his breath.
All press reports that portray this as some obscure data mix up are misleading. This was a scandal, flat-out fraud and malfeasance, with APD removing the head of a major division because she wouldn't falsify data to make the department appear to be solving more crimes. As Grits opined on Twitter when the news came out, "This was not a bureaucratic error, as Manley would like to portray it. The head of the sex crime unit was removed from her job because she refused to falsify clearance-rate numbers. Thank God she spoke up!"
The ouster of the sex-crimes-unit head happened on former Chief Art Acevedo's watch, but Chief Manley's ham-handed response has made the scandal and its cover-up his own. In a city with an aggressive, watchdog press, he might not survive the scandal. In Austin, he's betting he'll limp through thanks to lapdogs in the lame-stream press, and a few years ago, that might have been a safe assumption.
But survivor advocates and city council members are going to read the audit for themselves, and in the wake of the union-contract fight, mainstream media has proven less important in the capital city than ever before when it comes to policing politics. Whether the press report it or not, APD has been caught in a lie for all to see. If he wants to keep his job, Chief Manley must stop the media games and obfuscations and address these topics more forthrightly.
An apology to the rape survivors whose cases APD lied about - claiming their cases couldn't move forward because the victims wouldn't cooperate - would be a good start.
Boy... And here I thought it was the lack of bite mark evidence that was letting all those rapists go free ��
ReplyDeleteI read the article they released on the Audit for NHCD and they were both negligent and inflammatory how they reported the information. Yet this information they down play.
ReplyDeleteIsn't this the same Bryan Manley who fumbled the APD Crime Lab DNA Unit, closing it's doors in 2016 because of ineptitude. As I recall, Police Chief Art Acevedo also had a hand in fraudulent reporting and cover-up in 2010. Is there no recourse for presenting fraudulent information to the public?
ReplyDeleteIt's time for Mr. Manley to retire. Clearly he is unaccountable for the poor decisions he makes that end up costing taxpayers money and time. Ironically he job is to "protect and serve", but who is he actually protecting and serving?
To be fair, the DNA unit went south on Acevedo's watch. He literally left town for his job in Houston days bf the scandal came out. So Manley was chief when the news dropped, but only just barely. Acevedo was responsible.
ReplyDeleteBut Manley made a number of catastrophic errors after Acevedo bolted including hiring a new Lab Director that was unqualified and then paying him $94,000 to leave, failure to adequately re-train the lab analysts or hiring new analysts opting instead to close the lab indefinitely, and a late disclosure of over 800 moldy Sexual Assault kits.
ReplyDeleteThen, of course, he never investigated the previous 2010 auditors and the Texas Ranger's Report that stated, falsely and fraudulently, that everything was A-OK at the APD Lab (re-vomited by the FSC). No investigation into these falsification of government documents (which, of course, were used by Prosecutors to brush away any questions of forensic misconduct. See EX PARTE ARELI ESCOBAR, 2017)
Transparency and disclosure are not Manley's forte.
https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2017/09/the-implosion-of-austins-crime-lab-a-timeline/
That's a fair criticism, 1:28, thanks for that detail. Sort of feels similar to the rape clearance issue. He's essentially adopting Acevedo's failures and making them his own instead of cleaning up his old boss' mess. smh
ReplyDeleteI listened to the KUT coverage of the audit findings today and not one word of whistle blowing or anyone being pressured to leave their job. Not a single word. According to the story media interest lead to cities around the country to do an audit, Austin being one of them, and it's still a mystery as to why these errors were made. Very disappointed in KUT.
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