When you’re the top cop in Texas, you can leave on your terms.
Not amid the cries of the anguished families of Uvalde, but by the applause of those gathered in Austin for the graduation of the newest class of Texas state troopers.
The announcement of Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw’s retirement on Friday, wrapped in accolades from Gov. Greg Abbott, is not the resignation Uvalde parents demanded two years ago when the department’s failures and false narratives surrounding the deadliest school shooting in Texas history were painfully exposed. But some still found comfort in McCraw’s departure.
“About time!!” Brett Cross, who lost his son, Uziyah “Uzi” Garcia, in the Uvalde shooting, wrote on social media Friday about the DPS director’s retirement. “Good to have him out of it.”
Still, it’s a hollow conclusion to the tragedy at Uvalde, a neatly packaged end to McCraw’s career that brushes aside the accountability grieving families deserved.
Accountability would have been achieved if the actions of the 91 DPS officers who stood still for more than an hour on May 24, 2022, while a gunman shot and killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde had been fully and publicly disclosed.
Instead, DPS has been stonewalling. The department continues to fight a court order to release documents about the shooting, and McCraw has refused for 18 months to hear the appeal of Texas Ranger Christopher Ryan Kindell, one of two officers who received a letter of termination for Uvalde’s response (the other officer had retired).
With hundreds of police officers from multiple agencies responding to the shooting, the culpability of any one officer is up for debate. But as I wrote in January, blocking Kindell’s appeal prevented the case from reaching a public hearing that would have subjected the entire DPS response to scrutiny. Any hope of that reckoning was dashed earlier this month, when McCraw quietly reinstated Kindell.
Accountability also would have been that the Public Safety Commission held McCraw to his 2022 promise to resign if DPS was “anyway at fault” for the botched response. Instead, commissioners incredibly praised McCraw last year when they gave him a $45,437 raise, bringing his annual salary to $345,250.
Somehow, McCraw was rewarded with a 15% pay raise after a Texas House committee found “systematic failures and egregious poor decision-making” and the U.S. Department of Justice documented “cascading failures” in law enforcement at Uvalde.
That pay raise, awarded exactly one year ago, increased the average of McCraw’s top three earning years, meaning he’ll receive a higher monthly pension when he retires.
“We are truly fortunate to have someone of Steve McCraw’s caliber as director of the Department of Public Safety,” Public Safety Commission Chairman Steven P. Mach said last year. And on Friday, Abbott praised McCraw as “a leader, a visionary and the quintessential law enforcement officer that Texas is famous for — big, white cowboy hat and all.”
Wow. Luckily our DPS chief looked like this.
I realize that McCraw spent 15 years leading a large agency with challenging missions, from leading Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border security to conducting highway patrols to running the state’s overcrowded driver’s license offices.
“There is no more important responsibility in government than ensuring the safety and security of our citizens,” McCraw wrote in his letter announcing his retirement. Leading the DPS, he added, “has been the greatest honor of my life.”
The tragedy at Uvalde was not the entirety of McCraw’s tenure. But the botched response and false narratives are indelibly etched in his legacy, even if official announcements of his retirement are silent about them.
Texans will not forget, and the Uvalde parents who buried their children two years ago will not give up. Nineteen families of the victims filed a lawsuit against DPS and 92 officers in May, hoping the courts will provide much-needed accountability.
McCraw may be hanging up his own distinctive trooper hat, but his story isn’t over yet.
Grumet is the Metro columnist for the Statesman. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@statesman.com or by hitting X at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at statesman.com/opinion/columns.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: McCraw ends DPS term without answering to Uvalde | Grumet
