The main goal of the Austin Police Department

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

Austin, the capital city of Texas, is centrally located between San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. Austin has a population of 667,000 in the city limits and over 1 million in the metropolitan Austin area. The city covers a land area of 238 square miles and the Austin metropolitan area encompasses 2,705 square miles. Located within the city limits of Austin are two of a chain of seven lakes that comprise the Highland Lakes. The other five lakes are located to the north-west of the city. The University of Texas in Austin is the largest component of the University of Texas System and is home to over 50,000 students, 3,000 faculty and 18,000 staff members.

PROGRAM BACKGROUND

The Austin Police Department (APD) estimates that, in their jurisdiction, motorists who drink and drive are involved in approximately 50% of fatal collisions and an equal percentage of serious injury collisions2. The Austin Police also estimate that after 2 a.m., two out of every four motorists on the road are driving under the influence of alcohol. The estimated numbers of drinking drivers, and the high percentage of serious injury and fatality crashes, prompted the APD to take additional action to protect local citizens. The APD launched a trial anti-DWI task force in January 1998, followed by a permanent anti-DWI Enforcement Unit in August 1998.

In addition to public safety, these specialized anti-DWI enforcement teams helped to ad-dress a procedural problem within the Department. Prior to the creation of the dedicated unit, officers spent an inordinate amount of time, shown by early dispatch data to be between three and four hours, handling a DWI arrest. The result was that officers were out of service and off the roadways for much too long a period of time. Part of the time required to process a DWI arrest involved waiting for video facilities to become available at the police station. Having a specialized team dedicated to handling DWI suspects, implementing revamped procedures, and in-stalling video cameras in the specialized team’s patrol units streamlined the process, and allowed arresting officers to return to service more quickly.

The main goal of the Austin Police Department anti-DWI enforcement team was to in-crease public safety on the highways by detecting and removing more impaired drivers. This goal was to be fulfilled by meeting the following objectives:

• Increase the number of arrests for DWI through the addition of this special enforcement unit.
• Allow all APD officers to hand over suspected impaired drivers to the special enforcement officers for testing and processing, thereby reducing the amount of time required by all officers to process DWI suspects to allow officers more road time.
• Provide additional equipment and support to assist in the reduction of the processing time.
• Provide officers with tools to make their court appearances more effective, thus, theoretically, increasing the conviction rate and decreasing the officers’ time required to obtain a conviction.

LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY DESCRIPTION

In 2002 there were 1,198 sworn officers and 586 civilian employees working at the Austin Police Department. The APD, as with all large urban law enforcement agencies, is a police department ever evolving to meet the needs of the citizens

In 1998, the Department decentralized its operations to create a neighborhood-based model of law enforcement. In this reorganization, the City of Austin was divided into six area commands (described in the Geographic Jurisdiction section below), with resources transferred to the neighborhood level to solve problems at their source. In September 2001, a seventh area command was added to focus on the downtown-central business district. Two additional sectors are to be added in late 2003.

Each area command is managed by a commander and staffed with its own patrol units, detectives, street response teams, motor units and civilian support staff. The theory is that de-centralizing operations and empowering area commanders with the resources to serve law enforcement needs at the neighborhood level enhance both the response to crime and the ability to prevent crime. Patrol officers have the opportunity to develop stronger ties to the community, communicate effectively with residents and businesses to prevent crime, and build a relationship of mutual respect and trust with the community they serve.

To provide a liaison between patrol officers and neighborhoods, the district representative (DR) program was implemented citywide in 1998. First tried as a pilot program in the Northeast Area Command, the DR program assigns a district representative, a sworn police officer, to tar-get specific districts within an area command. The DR officer develops close working relation-ships with citizen groups, neighborhood associations and businesses. When special problems arise within a district, the DR officer can focus on the problem and manage resources to best ad-dress the issue.

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