Art Acevedo, Chief of Police, Austin Police Department

Art Acevedo, Chief of Police, Austin Police Department

Written by Darcie Duttweiler Friday, 27 June 2008

Contact: Art.acevedo@ci.austin.tx.us, 947-5030

Art Acevedo was sworn in as Austin Police Department’s eighth chief of police last July. Acevedo began his professional career in law enforcement in 1986 in California, where he grew up, and earned his Bachelor of Science degree in public administration from the University of La Verne.

Q. What is a typical day on the job for you?

A. [Laughs] There is no typical day. A typical day is a very long one that includes usually up to seven days a week. You get up early and hit the ground running. You go from meeting to meeting, getting media inquiries, and cramming as much as you can into one day. One of the commitments I made in the hiring process was to be well known by the community. I wanted the community to know my heart and my thinking process, and I feel that the relationship with this department and the community starts and ends with the chief. If the chief of police does not have a good, solid working relationship that’s built on trust and respect, no matter how good the cops are, they will never be able to achieve their full potential. I never turn down an opportunity to speak with folks if my calendar will allow it. We’ve created an environment that makes people feel like I’m their chief. I have people in the streets who call out, ‘Chief Art, Chief Art,’ and I have no clue who they are.

Q. Do you have any day-to-day duties?

A. One day you could end up at the hospital with one of your folks hurt, which is one of the worst things about this job, having to go to hospitals. Another day, you’re at the city hall, in and out of meetings and speeches. There are a lot of speaking engagements. I think I have some today. I enjoy [those] because it gives me the opportunity to reach out to other people and to bridge the gaps of different segments of the community. There is a historical divide, and I think the more the folks from East Austin get to know the folks from West Austin, and North and South and Central, the more they’ll realize we have much more in common than differences. When people come together and realize they have the same hopes, fears and dreams, it drops a lot of barriers, and we end up with a much better community.

Q. What made you want to take the job in Austin?

A. I went online looking for job opportunities. I was reading the job description, and I felt in my heart they were describing me. I know that’s kind of corny, but I’m a corny guy. I turned to my wife, and I said, ‘They’re looking for someone who understands community relations, who’s committed to policing, who understands the media.’ To me, the media are our partners. They hold us accountable, which is why we have the First Amendment, and they help us reach out to the community and get our message out in the community. But I really felt like I was the right person, so I put a lot of work into trying to get this job, and I got it.

Q. What are your main roles as chief of police?

A. My main role is setting, from a broad policy perspective, the vision, the goals and the standards for the organization. So really, I’m responsible for the overall operations of the organization in terms of the successes and the failures. I paint a broad picture for the folks. My chief of staff is responsible for the daily operations. He’s the one who takes my message and my vision, and his officers carry out that vision. I don’t want to get caught up in the minutiae because when you get caught up in the minutiae, you’re not trusting your people, and you end up missing things. I’m a big picture guy.

Q. What is the toughest decision you’ve had to make?

A. The toughest issues you have to deal with are when you’re deciding whether you’re going to fire someone because you know that decision is going to impact their families and their kids. It is a decision that is not taken lightly. Some of them are really easy in terms of making the decision, but it’s still agonizing for me because you have children paying for the sins of their parents. You think of your own children. I have three, and they’re very proud of the fact their dad is a police officer, and if I ever lost my job, the sense of disappointment and shame goes to them. You’ve gotta move beyond that and think of what is good for the organization and what is good for the masses. We have an obligation to ourselves and our community we serve to set the bar really high for performance and responsibility because I really believe people will rise to the level of expectations that you set.

Q. What’s unique about Austin’s challenges?

A. Here we live in a big city that has a small-town mentality. I don’t think Austin realizes that we’ve grown up. They think this is still a small, quiet town. This is a major, urban city. You can’t leave your doors unlocked. You can’t leave your garage door open and then turn around and wonder why you got burglarized. And that happens all the time. There is a little bit of denial and naiveté here. Wishing we’re still a small town ain’t gonna cut it, and we can’t be like parents who never see their children as adults. The baby we call Austin has grown up, and with that growth has come some ills that affect every other urban American city. And we live in a safe city, but I don’t care where you live — there isn’t a community on the planet Earth where crime does not impact you sooner or later. I always tell my wife and children that we’re safe, but you need to be aware that things can happen.

Q. Any similarities between Austin and California?

A. There are a lot of Californians here. It’s a very California-like city. This city draws comparisons to San José. I love that Texans are extremely genuine and friendly. I really have a sense of community here that you don’t get other places. It really makes Austin a special place to live. I feel fortunate to be a part of this community.

Q. Any unique challenges in North Austin?

A. No, I don’t think any of us live on an island. There may be different degrees of the same challenge, but property crime hits every part of Austin. Crime will visit every neighborhood in the country at some point, but it’s the degree of those visits. The thing with North Austin is that the city is growing in a northerly direction. We are constantly looking at our resources to ensure that we have a proper distribution of resources. Our city is constantly changing. We have to track those changes and make the appropriate adjustments to our strategies. Next month we start our Comstat, which is a data, intelligence-driven policing. We can gather data more effectively and use the information to solve crime and look at it and try to predict where the crime is moving to next.

Q. What is the “Summer Heat 2008” campaign?

A. Every summer between Memorial Day and Labor Day, an average of 16 Austinites lose their lives on our roadways because you have greater incidents of drunk driving, you have people traveling more for summer vacations. Historically, it’s a time when we have more injuries and deaths. We wanted a campaign to see if we could save some lives. Through increased enforcement and zero-tolerance for seat belt, speeding and DWI, we’re hoping that when Labor Day comes around, we have maybe 15 [deaths], and, that’s a life saved. A lot of people think that when we enforce traffic laws, it’s about money. I could not care less. I’m not in the moneymaking business; I’m in the life-saving business. What drives us to enforce the traffic laws is to sometimes save people from themselves. When cops write those tickets, the lives they save may be their own. We all live, shop, play in Austin. People are up in arms about this pedestrian law, saying that we just want to make money. No, 40 percent of my fatalities last year — 24 out of 60 people that died — were pedestrians.

Q&A about the Violent Crimes Task Force

Q. What is the Violent Crimes Task Force?

A. That is a task force created under a grant from the Justice Grant Program. It’s a $500,000, one-year project that will be using intelligence-driven data. It will be a multijurisdictional response to violent crimes and gangs in the area. We’re very fortunate that our gang activity, and our overall crime level, is low when you compare it to other major metropolitan areas, and we want to keep it that way. That’s why we go out and aggressively pursue these grants because it lets us leverage our internal resources with some federal dollars to really have an impact on violent crime. Our hope is to cut back on robberies, solve robberies and other gang-related crimes.

Q. And phase one is now complete?

A. It ran through May 17, and the second phase started June 2 and will go through July 12. And it’s data-driven policing, and it will tell us where we’re at, and we’ll see if we need to move the task force. Crime is like a cancer, and if you let it go unchecked in one part of the community, it’ll only be a matter of time before it hits you. With intelligence-based policing, we have got to keep the heat on. If the criminals move, we have to move with them. The hope is eventually they’ll move to another city altogether.

Q. How did phase one go?

A. There is a direct correlation to enforcement and traffic safety and crime. The more we’re out there, the greater our visibility … Here are the results: We’ve seen a 20 percent reduction of violent crime in April. There were zero robberies in the Loyola and Manor area. Zero robberies in the Rundberg, I-35 area, so they did really well. The only area where robberies went up was the Cameron and St. John area, so that tells us we need to strengthen our presence there. We are always looking for opportunities to leverage our resources to combat any problems we may have.

Q. You’ve proposed installing video surveillance cameras in four high-crime areas around town, including on Rundberg Lane and IH 35, which is expected to cost a great deal. How do you believe cameras in this area will alleviate crime, and is it worth the price?

A. The funding we’re getting from that is from grants, and we’re always looking for grant funding. It’s absolutely worth the price because of a couple of reasons. Number one, if you know there is a camera there to capture your behavior, hopefully your behavior will change. Two, it gives us the opportunity for a real-time response to criminal activity. Three, some of the technology that’s available now, you can program it where if someone falls down, automatically that camera will alert and that actual picture will come up at the monitoring station. There are a lot of ways to program these cameras. You could program it so that if there are more than ten people, an alert will come up. So, imagine in terms of a medical emergency if someone passes out or falls, we can be alerted right away. As technology, as face recognition becomes available, we will be able to alert when we see a wanted person on that camera. This is a long-term project that has other capabilities in the future.