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Austin police want you to know that reform is underway at APD. The department’s leaders appeared at City Hall last week to show City Council members they say demonstrates that officers are using less force in encounters with community members, even though arrests have risen.
Social justice advocates are questioning the department’s math. The new data come courtesy of Robin Engel, an Ohio State University research scientist who, for the last year, has worked on a comprehensive review of APD’s use-of-force policies, the training of its cadets, and its data-collection processes. Engel told Council that APD’s end-of-year reports from 2022 to 2025 overstated, by a factor of two-to-one, how frequently officers used force.
Part of the reason, Engel said, is that the department has been counting minor uses of force, like twisting a suspect’s arm or slapping them with an open palm – actions that aren’t counted by other departments across the country. She said APD will no longer count these actions as uses of force.
The department is making another data collection change as well. Engel said APD will now count use-of-force incidents with what is called a “subject-level” approach. Under its previous “action” method, APD counted each separate use of force against an individual during an encounter. For example, if a subject was tackled, punched, and Tased by officers, those actions counted as three uses of force. In the new calculation, the same event will be reported based on the subject who was tackled, punched, and Tased, and count for just one use of force. The application of this new approach helped cut the department’s reported use of force numbers over the last three years in half – from 18,263 to 8,944.
Even with the new approach, the data show a 9% increase in use-of-force incidents in 2025, compared with the average of the previous three years. But there were also 24% more arrests in 2025 compared with the three-year average, meaning that officers used force less often during these encounters. Engel assured the Council members that APD’s data will still fully describe the uses of force, but that counting by subject level is considered best practice and will make comparisons with other departments more valid. “That’s not to say that the other information isn’t collected or isn’t valuable,” Engel said, “but when we’re analyzing it, and talking about it, and looking at it for training and policy reasons, it’s best practice to look at it by subject.”
Savannah Lee, the leader of social justice advocates Equity Action, told Council that counting multiple uses of force by subject instead of action will reduce transparency. “That doesn’t reflect reality,” Lee said. “It undercounts the actual volume of force. It masks how many officers are involved and makes it hard to identify patterns of escalation.”
Rebecca Webber, an attorney who has argued many excessive-use-of-force lawsuits against the city, said the new method doesn’t align with how the law treats the use of force. She described the, who was shot at least two dozen times by APD officers in 2018. “For each use of force, the Constitution says you have to have a valid, justified reason,” Webber said. “Even if the first shot might have been justified, the subsequent shots might not be.”
Webber also questioned the report’s conclusion that there were no significant racial or ethnic disparities in the department’s recent uses of force. Engel told Council that, after controlling for other factors, Black and Hispanic arrestees have, since 2023, had the same likelihood as whites of having force used against them. Webber said that have found that APD officers applied the law differently against Black and Hispanic individuals and that the report’s conclusion “just defies common sense.”
In her remarks, Engel predicted that officers will use force less in 2026 and emphasized the reforms APD is making in training and policy. “We are doubling down on de-escalation,” she told Council. “The idea is to set in policy the expectation that de-escalation will be used when it’s safe and reasonable under the totality of circumstances.”
APD’s Richard Egal, commander in charge of recruitment and training, had a similar message in a presentation to Council’s Public Safety Committee on April 6. Egal told Council that new cadets are being taught to de-escalate violent encounters with two initiatives: the Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement program, which requires officers to intervene when their colleagues don’t follow policy, and the Integrating Communications, Assessment & Tactics program, which helps officers make sound decisions when confronted with suspects armed with a weapon other than a firearm.
Egal, who was found to have used excessive force himself in 2017, said the department implemented a new model this January that teaches recruits to make decisions based on ethics, values, proportionality, and the sanctity of human life. He said the model is “going to continue to be integrated throughout everything that we’re doing, not only in training, but in operations.”
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Brant Bingamon arrived in Austin in 1981 to attend UT and immediately became fascinated by the city's music scene. He's spent his adult life playing in bands and began writing for the Chronicle in 2019, covering criminal justice, the death penalty, and public school issues. He has two children, Noah and Eryl, and lives with his partner Adrienne on the Eastside.
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