The Texas Observer

Kudos to Col. Thomas Davis, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, that he didn’t insult our intelligence with the old I’m-retiring-to-be-with-my-family line. Instead the statement that went out this afternoon simply said:

“After 43 years and 9 months with the Texas Department of Public Safety, I am retiring on Aug. 31, 2008.”

Davis became director of the DPS in 2000. The resignation won’t become official until the DPS Commission meets on Thursday. Nor will we likely have an inkling until then who might replace him.

Those in the media will probably blame fallout from the fire at the governor’s mansion and the browbeating Davis received from legislators at a June 24 public hearing of the Sunset Advisory Commission as reasons why he stepped down.

I have my doubts.

If the mansion fire was a DPS error, the fault likely did not reside with Davis. Yes the DPS did not have sufficient staff at the mansion. But one has to wonder if troopers were pulled off the mansion detail to accompany the governor as he gallivanted around Europe on the taxpayer’s dime. We will never know since DPS does not comment on the governor’s security. Another, perhaps more likely, reason why there was only one trooper at the mansion has to do with Operation Border Star, Perry’s get-tough on the border initiative. It is now apparently standard practice to send troopers down in squads to patrol the border area, stretching an already undermanned agency.

The Sunset Review found all manner of problems at the DPS, including the aforementioned shortage of officers. This is less Davis’ fault than the demographics of an aging population and a very young one without much in between. It also doesn’t help that there is fierce competition for officers from the border patrol and the military. The feds pay more. The review also found fault with DPS’ handling of driver’s licenses. The logical solution to this would be to spin off this non-law enforcement responsibility as a stand alone or move it to another agency, say TXDOT. DPS Commission Chairman Alan Polunsky made it clear that he would never agree to such a move.

Polunsky is not waiting for the Sunset review process to play itself out over the next legislative session. In this way, the reforms underway will not be widely disseminated and publicly debated before implementation. Instead there appears to be a still-largely secret plan for DPS. This plan may have played a role in Davis’ departure.

To begin to understand what is underway, read Perry’s 2005 homeland security plan authored by Steve McCraw. The plan calls for a statewide intelligence service. This state intelligence service is to focus on intelligence gathering and counter-terrorism investigations. TDEX, the governor’s database, was a piece of this plan.

Polunsky referred to this obliquely at the Sunset hearing, when he said that the commission will “be directing the department to extend into other areas as we go forward.”

I called the chairman the following day and invited him to expand on his remarks. While insisting that “nothing has been decided,” he admitted that “there is probably going to be some movement in that [intelligence] direction.”

A consultant will look at the agency from top to bottom before changes are instituted.

Then there is the cauldron of personalities that can be DPS.

There has long been a rumor of tension between the graduates of the so-called class of ‘77. That class included Kent Mawyer, chief of DPS’ criminal law enforcement division, current DPS Assistant Director David McEathron, and Perry’s Homeland Security Director McCraw. While Mawyer and McEathron scaled the hierarchy at DPS, McCraw, an El Paso native, left the agency in 1983 to join the FBI as a special agent. We’ve heard McCraw and his former DPS colleagues don’t always get along.

Does McCraw hope to head this new intelligence service/state police? Are his former classmates troubled by the changes under discussion? Did Davis’ efforts to mediate the potential conflict fall flat? We don’t know. Was the rush to make changes to DPS before the Legislature convenes in January a factor? Hard to say.

We will try to get some answers to these questions in the days ahead. In the meantime, Davis had a very tough job that he did quite well. It’s a shame for Texas that he is stepping down.

by Jake Bernstein

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 7:50 pm and is filed under 80th Texas Lege, Criminal Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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