AUSTIN — Starting Thursday, officers with the Austin Police Department will have some new guidelines to follow that will help them decide between making an arrest or handing out a ticket, with some changes made to their cite-and-release policy.
Cite-and-release refers to when officers hand out citations instead of sending people to jail for certain lower-tier crimes. The APD's previous policy had a list of 11 occurrences that could restrict an officer from handing out one of these citations, in a way, forcing them to make an arrest.
Troy Gay is the assistant chief of the Austin Police Department, and he said these restrictions were not always productive for the officers' ability to make a decision in the arresting process.
"Our policy, in the past, actually restricted them into having some form of identification, which was a disqualifier for cite-and-release," Gay said. "They had to make the arrest at that point. I think this holistic approach to looking at cite-and-release is better. I believe we now have a very comprehensive policy that will be sort of a guide for other agencies."
Now, instead of 11 restrictions related to cite-and-release, it is down to four. These include if people would be dangerous to the public if they were released; if the person in question refuses to sign a citation; if the subject exposes themselves or if an officer cannot identify a person with their new identification process.
"Several years ago, the legislature gave municipal agencies the ability to sort-of come up with their own cite-and-release policies," Gay said. "Not all individuals that we know here in Austin actually have a governmental ID. What we wanted to do was sort of broaden the ability of our officers to be able to use all the technology and all the access to different types of databases that they have at their fingertips to actually utilize those to figure out if they can identify an individual."
This all ties back to June, when the Austin City Council sent APD a request to form a committee to look into the racial disparities in their arrests. The department took that step and came up with the new policies going into effect Thursday.
"Having everybody at the table with an equal voice provided us to come up with a policy that sort of looked at the unintended consequences of the arrests in lieu of a citation," Gay said. "Individuals will still be held accountable, but it may be showing up for court and handling it in a different manner -- allowing these individuals to have access to deferred adjudication or to programs that they can enter to really address the behavior or the particular citation or charges that they were charged with."
Gay also said APD leaders had extensive conversations with different organizations and groups of people before deciding how they would adjust their policies: this included talking to people who could have gotten one of these citations but ended up getting arrested instead. Along with this new freedom for the officers, in terms of deciding to make an arrest, the new policy has actually expanded the number of offenses that are eligible for cite-and-release.
Gay said a main goal of the new policies is to decrease the number of people they are sending to jail for misdemeanor-level crimes, which will also keep officers out of the office doing paperwork and get them back on the streets.
"We need to look at alternative methods," Gay said. "Just going to jail or sending someone to jail is not always the answer."