Re: What are your "complaint" options?
Posted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 1:01 pm
Time to look into injunctive relief?
v7a wrote:In case anyone was under the impression that reporting APD harassment will do any good:
reddit poster wrote:Austin police have what can only be called an official stated policy of demanding ID, under penalty of arrest, from subjects who are detained but not under arrest when ID is requested. Yes, TX Penal Code 38.02 does not allow that (though there are certain narrow ID-on-detention situations like on the UT campus or while concealed carrying a handgun). Yes, APD has been made very directly and explicitly aware of this. Yes, the office of the Police Monitor is aware of this. Yes, staff of the City Council were briefed on this. Yes, there have been Texas Public Information Act requests filed and answered, and -- yes -- they show APD staffers being explicitly aware of the current law as they lobby the state legislature to loosen it. No, nothing has changed.
...
There are thousands of Failure to Identify arrests in this city just in a period of a few years that I started to analyze last year. I've pulled from APD, the County Court, and some from the Municipal Court, but there have always been missing elements involved in nailing down a pattern on things like race, age, and geography, and part of the difficulty has in truth been down to stonewalling. The behavior of public information officers in particular has been very disheartening.