"Bargaining the Badge"

KXAN-TV
02/25/2020

Across Texas, hundreds of law enforcement officers have permanently surrendered their peace officer license in the past four years. A KXAN investigation of 297 of those surrenders has discovered nearly all the officers were accused or charged with a crime – most often felonies. And, in almost every case the officers used their license as a bargaining tool by agreeing to surrender it as part of a deal to avoid jail or prison.

Peace officer licenses are issued and maintained by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement. All law enforcement officers at the municipal, county and state level, except for state corrections officers, must be licensed. In at least 245 instances, peace officers used their licenses to leverage a lesser sentence in a plea bargain. More than 30 officers surrendered their licenses in lieu of prosecution or to halt an investigation.

KXAN uncovered the system of deals by analyzing records obtained from more than 100 public information act requests filed at all levels of state and local governments, including TCOLE, county and district courts, as well as local, county and state law enforcement agencies. Officers who agreed to surrender their licenses received little or no jail time for offenses including sexual assault of children and women in custody, taking bribes and dealing narcotics to prisoners, lying about the circumstances of a police shooting and destroying evidence in criminal cases.

In Texas, state law limits TCOLE's authority to permanently revoke an officer's license, unless he or she has been convicted of a felony or certain misdemeanors. If district attorneys want to get a bad police officer out of law enforcement, in most cases they either must go to trial or make a deal. Critics say Texas' license decertification laws are pushing district attorneys to make these plea bargains. Other states allow their police licensing boards broader discretion to punish officers not only for the conviction of a criminal offense but also for the commission of a crime.

Texas lawmakers on the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee are now conducting their own investigation into what KXAN uncovered, acknowledging there is a disconnect when state law allows licensing boards to hold other occupations, such as doctors, lawyers, plumbers and cosmetologists, accountable for conduct that doesn't amount to a criminal conviction. Lawmaker have now raised the possibility of introducing legislation to give TCOLE more authority to punish peace officer license holders for the mere commission of a crime.

This digital project featured the full series, along with several embedded videos of extended police camera footage in some of these cases. We also highlighted specific examples in separate case pages, giving users access to documents and more details to better understand the issue. We also included interactive maps and data components to explore the scope of this statewide problem.

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Submitted Josh Hinkle.