Special Austin City Council meeting held to discuss 2 important topics

Austin City Council public safety meeting

Austin city leaders are reviewing two important topics: the status of APD's training academy procedures, and the opioid crisis.

AUSTIN, Texas - A special meeting was called and held for the City of Austin's Public Safety Committee.

The first half of the meeting was dedicated to reviewing an audit created by Kroll, a company hired to review and assess Austin Police's progress on implementing its recommendations for the department's training academy that were made in 2021 and 2022.

"Through a lot of dedicated work done by the academy staff and with guidance from the Kroll team, we’ve been able to create the APD Operations Manual. Improvement is incremental, and the operations manual gives us a solid foundation from which to work from," said Rob McGrath, Program Manager with APD.

According to the report, Kroll says its recommended reform measures were supposed to be implemented by APD within 6 months. While some have been done, others have not.

APD leaders say they are working on implementing all the recommendations and have a three-phase plan to do just that. Phase one is the planning process, phase two is implementation, and then phase three, which is the evaluation phase.

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"Evaluation and continuous improvement phase, which is where we will be defining effectiveness and reporting our progress and improvement of the police academy," said McGrath.

Kroll mentions in its report that multiple changes in APD's leadership could be a contributing factor as to why its recommendations have not been prioritized. Kroll notes there have been four different assistant chiefs and five different commanders assigned to the police academy since 2020.

"With the high turnover rate, with the leadership out of the training academy, it has slowed progress because each time a new person comes in, it's not necessarily a plug-in play. It's a matter of getting what everyone up to speed, understanding the path forward and then implementing the change and with the continual turnover. It has been difficult to keep that continuity going. To make sure that we are doing it right, we are being methodical in the way that we move forward," said Interim APD Chief Robin Henderson.

The second part of the meeting focused on Austin Travis County EMA's response to the opioid crisis.

Division Chief Stephen White told the committee the county has twice as many opioid deaths as any other county in Texas. He says ATCEMS is working on ramping up Narcan accessibility and education.