When you’re the top cop in Texas, you get to leave on your terms.
Not amid the cries of anguished families from Uvalde, but over the applause of those gathered in Austin for the graduation of the newest crop of Texas state troopers.
Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw’s retirement announcement Friday, wrapped in accolades from Gov. Greg Abbott, isn’t the resignation that Uvalde parents demanded two years ago as the department’s failures and false narratives around the deadliest school shooting in Texas history came painfully into focus. But some took comfort in McCraw’s departure nonetheless.
“About time!!” Brett Cross, who lost his son, Uziyah “Uzi” Garcia, in the Uvalde shooting, wrote Friday on social media about the DPS director’s retirement. “Good riddance.”
Still, it is a hollow coda to the Uvalde tragedy, a neatly wrapped ending to McCraw’s career that sweeps aside the accountability that grieving families deserved.
Accountability would have been a full, public airing of the actions of the 91 DPS troopers who largely stood idle for more than an hour on May 24, 2022, while a gunman killed 19 kids and two teachers at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School.
Instead, the DPS has stonewalled. The department continues to fight a court order to release records about the shooting, and McCraw refused for 18 months to hear the appeal of Texas Ranger Christopher Ryan Kindell, one of only two officers served with termination papers for the Uvalde response (the other trooper retired).
With hundreds of law enforcement officers from various agencies responding to the shooting scene, the culpability of any one officer is up for debate. But, as I wrote in January, blocking Kindell’s appeal kept the matter from reaching a public hearing that would have opened the entire DPS response to scrutiny. Any hope for that reckoning evaporated earlier this month, when McCraw quietly reinstated Kindell.
Accountability also would have been the Public Safety Commission holding McCraw to his 2022 pledge to resign if the DPS had “any culpability” for the botched response. Instead, incredibly, commissioners praised McCraw last year as they gave him a $45,437 raise, boosting his annual salary to $345,250.
Somehow, in between a Texas House committee finding “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” and the U.S. Justice Department documenting law enforcement’s “cascading failures” at Uvalde, McCraw was rewarded with a 15% raise.
That pay hike, granted exactly a year ago, raised the average of McCraw’s three highest-earning years, which will translate into a higher monthly pension when he starts drawing his retirement benefits.
“We are truly fortunate to have somebody of the caliber of Steve McCraw as director of the Department of Public Safety,” Public Safety Commission Chair Steven P. Mach said last year. And on Friday, Abbott lauded McCraw as “a leader, visionary, and the quintessential lawman that Texas is so famous for — big, white cowboy hat and all.”
Wow. Good thing our DPS chief looked the part.
I recognize McCraw spent 15 years leading a vast agency entrusted with challenging missions, from running Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border security effort to handling highway patrols to operating the state’s woefully backlogged 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 in Uvalde was not the totality of McCraw’s tenure. But the failed response and false narratives are indelibly inked in his legacy, even if the official retirement announcements don’t carry a word about it.
Texans won’t forget, and the Uvalde parents who buried their children two years ago won’t give up. Nineteen families of the victims sued the DPS and 92 officers in May, looking to the courts to apportion some much-needed accountability.
McCraw may be hanging up that distinctive trooper hat on his own terms. But his story isn’t done.
Grumet is the Statesman’s Metro columnist. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@statesman.com or on X at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at statesman.com/opinion/columns.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: McCraw ends DPS tenure without accountability for Uvalde | Grumet
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