New study focuses on excessive use of force by APD officers

AUSTIN, Texas - The Office of Police Oversight is working to fight for more restrictive guidelines for use-of-force policies at APD; suggesting a change in eight use-of-force areas.

The areas include: 

• Restricting shooting at moving vehicles
• Exhausting all alternatives before using deadly force
• De-escalation
• The duty to intervene in cases of improper or excessive use of force
• Comprehensive reporting of uses of force
• Banning chokeholds and strangleholds
• Requiring a use-of-force continuum
• Warning before shooting

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"Use force affects everybody," said Farah Muscadin, Director of the Office of Police Oversight. "It affects the person involved. It affects the officers. It affects the officer's chain of command. It affects their team. It affects the community."

In the first area, the report looked at the dangers of shooting at moving vehicles. In the past year, two high-profile investigations in Austin, involved police shooting at suspects in their cars. The Mike Ramos case in April 2020, and most recently Alex Gonzales Jr. in January 2021.

Muscadin said shooting at moving vehicles is a dangerous tactic because it doesn't address the threat and can potentially add more harm. 

"They are risking injuring people in the car, innocent bystanders that might be in the area, or the car potentially crashing and causing more harm," said Muscadin. "You have to really look at balancing the potential harm and threat. And in this case, when we look at shooting in vehicles, and we look at best practices, it's just not a tactic that should be open for officers to use without specific limitations." 

The Office of Police Oversight said when it comes to incidents like these, APD's current policy is not clear, and or, very open. So, Muscadin said, they want to change that.  

"Our recommendation isn't a complete ban," she said. "Our recommendation tightens it up...recognizing that there may be instances where this might be an appropriate option for an officer. But it is completely open right now as APD policy currently stands and we completely disagree with that."

Kathy Mitchell is with Just Liberty and has worked in criminal reform for years. She said the actions of the Office of Police Oversight are the first steps of many.

"I feel like the whole dialogue that took that it took has gotten us to this moment where we're really looking at changing the police academy, which causes us to really look at what our values are and how we want to see those expressed in the goals of policing," Mitchell said.

Mitchell said when it comes to the use of excessive force, de-escalation is key. 

"De-escalating is really a communications process that you apply at every step of an interaction with a person," she said. "But in a lot of the more high-profile incidents where you can sort of clearly look at what happened, there is no de-escalation anywhere in sight."

Mitchell adds that law enforcement should focus on the all-around outcome. 

"At that point, is it more important to arrest that person in that moment, for perhaps a minor violation," she asked. "Was this thing that got you there in the first place so critical that if they drove away, you should shoot some to death? That's a conversation that we need to have. And to me, the shooting at moving vehicle is largely about that." 

The Office of Police Oversight's recommendation to have an officer only fire when they have exhausted all other alternatives. Or if the vehicle itself is being used as a weapon that could cause a mass casualty incident, such as being driven into a crowd of people.

"So what we provided in our recommendation was some more specificity around when that tactic can be useful and really limited," Muscadin said.

Austin Police were not available for an interview, but provided this statement to FOX 7:

"The Austin Police Department remains committed to ensuring our policies reflect best practices to maintain the safety of our community. As such, they are continually under review and updated. We will collaborate with the Office of Police Oversight on their recommendations during our policy review process."

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