If you haven’t heard of the most powerful unelected figure in Texas politics, you’d be forgiven. Steve McCraw, the longtime Texas Department of Public Safety Commissioner, is not a household name. And even his legion of fans and critics on Capitol Hill mistakenly call him Steve McGraw. But McCraw, who abruptly announced last week that he will retire at the end of the year, has done far more to change Texas government and politics than most of the elected officials he theoretically serves. He is Texas’ J. Edgar Hoover, a law enforcement officer and politician whose power has grown alongside his years of usefulness to the Republican Party. And like Hoover, he seems to have an uncanny knack for evading accountability. Over time, he has become too big to fail.
In 2004, Governor Rick Perry recruited McCraw from the FBI to be the state’s homeland security secretary. In that role, McCraw surprised civil liberties advocates and some lawmakers by overseeing the creation of the Texas Data Exchange (TDEx), a massive intelligence database managed by the governor’s office. McCraw also helped Perry launch a major experiment in giving states responsibility for border security that had previously been the responsibility of the federal government.
Perry appointed him head of DPS in 2009. McCraw has focused on post-9/11 intelligence and an obsession with “spillover violence” from Mexico. Traditionalists in law enforcement have watched McCraw’s transformation of DPS with alarm. If the head of DPS was more sensitive to al-Qaeda and Los Zetas, could DPS still effectively perform its core crime-fighting functions of highway policing and large-scale state criminal investigations?
When McCraw became chief, he inherited one of the most high-profile criminal cases in modern Texas history: the Governor’s Mansion arson case. In 2008, while Perry and his wife, Anita, were in Europe, someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the stately home. Three years later, DPS released intriguing details about a suspect with anarchist ties who the department was investigating. “We don’t believe in coincidences,” McCraw told reporters at the time. For a while, it looked like McCraw would solve the biggest crime of the decade, proving to critics that DPS could still solve major criminal cases the old-fashioned way. But the case fell flat, and 16 years later, it remains unsolved.
Lawmakers worried that DPS was one step behind in solving serious crimes, but they didn’t show it. McCraw’s boss, Perry, and Congress had bigger concerns than arson. By the time Perry ran for a third term in 2010, border security had become an imperative in Republican politics. ( Imperative is Latin for “nothing less.”)
Perry became obsessed with militarizing the border, and McCraw gladly obliged, overseeing the establishment of the nation’s first full-scale border patrol apparatus. Suddenly, DPS gunboats equipped with .30-caliber guns were roaring up and down the Rio Grande, and state police forces were pouring into Texas’ border regions, particularly the Rio Grande Valley. “We’re using tactics and equipment that you would see on the battlefield,” a DPS captain told a documentary film crew in early 2012.
Six months later, a DPS sniper operating from a helicopter opened fire on a speeding F-150 near the border town of La Jolla. The sniper wrongly assumed the truck was carrying drugs. Six Guatemalan migrants were hiding in the truck’s bed under a tarp. The sniper shot three of them, killing two. McCraw called the killings “deeply tragic,” but argued that the “recklessly speeding” truck posed a threat to an elementary school a few miles away. Why was DPS the only law enforcement agency in the country to allow police to shoot at moving vehicles from helicopters? How did the DPS director bear responsibility for the consequences of waging a deadly war on Texas communities? Republican lawmakers seem curiously uninterested in such questions. “There’s no need for a hearing,” said state Rep. Sid Miller, who served as chairman of the Texas House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee (Miller is now the state agriculture commissioner).
Shortly after Greg Abbott became governor, in 2015, he doubled down on border militarization. Then he tripled it, then quadrupled it. Today, the Texas-Mexico border is perhaps the world’s most important stage for American politicians, a photo-op that has launched and sustained the careers of thousands of Republicans. If the border is a theater, then the director of DPS is props man, stage manager, and supporting actor all in one.
In front of television cameras and at hearings on Capitol Hill, McCraw often appears in uniform — Texas browns and a cowboy hat — and unleashes a torrent of homeland-security-focused officer talk about the “force multipliers” and “vertical stack” “detection coverage” provided by drones, cameras and “tactical” boats.
During Governor Abbott’s first term, lawmakers and the press critically reviewed data on the state’s border patrol success rate. The results were dismal. They found that DPS tried to take credit for drug seizures made by other agencies and classified routine policing hundreds of miles from the border as part of border patrol operations. DPS officers seemed to spend too much time ticketing RGV drivers in predominantly Hispanic counties and neglecting traffic enforcement in other parts of the state. In a 2015 report to the Legislature, McCraw offered a utopian vision of success: “The border will be secure if all smuggling incidents between ports of entry are detected and stopped.” That could be achieved, the report said, by having “sufficient” officers and Texas Rangers on-site and a network of security cameras and surveillance aircraft.
At first glance, this is an outlandish claim. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the 1,254-mile Texas-Mexico border knows catching all the smugglers is a pipe dream. But the moment for congressional accountability passed quickly. The politics of policing border “invasions,” Abbott’s preferred term, were too good to let facts get in the way. Lawmakers showered the DPS director with more funding and more responsibility. For 2023, Congress gave DPS $1.2 billion for border operations, a 28 percent increase. Apprehensions of illegal immigrants crossing the Southwest border have plummeted in recent months, but there is no evidence that Texas’ efforts are to blame.
McCraw’s importance can be gauged by the impact, or lack thereof, made by how his agency responded to the Uvalde shooting. Let’s not forget, it took nearly 400 police officers, including 91 DPS officers, more than an hour to confront the shooter responsible for the deaths of 19 fourth-graders and two teachers. Heavily armed officers stood in the hallway while the children called 911 for help.
In the aftermath, different agencies and officers blamed each other. But in that moment, parents knew exactly what to do. Several people tried to run into the school but were physically blocked by officers. One mother was arrested. A subsequent investigation found that police had prioritized their own safety over saving lives. After the shooting, DPS officials provided misleading information about the police response, and McCraw initially told reporters at a press conference the next day that officers immediately “engaged” the shooter, a statement that later turned out to be completely false. Abbott said that “things could have been much worse” without the “incredible bravery” of police. Abbott has never said who provided the misinformation.
Immediately after the shooting, the governor issued a stern warning to DPS and the Texas Rangers (the symbolic agents are DPS forces) to get to the bottom of what went wrong. This was like asking a livestock guardian to find out how a fox got into the chicken coop. What were the chances that McCraw would blame his agency, and therefore himself and the governor? Grieving Uvalde parents calling for his resignation may have attracted the media’s attention, but McCraw also had the governor’s ear. For the next two years, DPS worked tirelessly to pin Uvalde CISD Police Chief Pete Arredondo as the culprit, and shrouded a veil of secrecy over mountains of information that could illuminate the full scope of the shooting. To this day, a media coalition is suing to obtain records from DPS, but at this point, it’s unclear what else we might learn about how the agency failed these children and their teachers.
In 2022, McCraw called the law enforcement response a “total failure” and vowed to resign if the police department was found “liable in any way.” Subsequent investigations uncovered much of the blame. A U.S. Department of Justice report blamed one Texas Ranger for not challenging Arredondo for a lack of urgency. The report also faulted Police Department South Texas Director Victor Escalon for failing to set up a perimeter outside the classroom to preserve the integrity of the crime scene, and for wandering aimlessly and compromising the integrity of the crime scene.
What’s happening with the investigations of the 91 DPS officers? To date, McCraw has done little to hold his subordinates accountable. One officer, Sergeant Juan Maldonado, was given notice of termination but resigned before the termination could be finalized. McCraw initially tried to fire another ranger, Christopher Ryan Kindell, but quietly reinstated him in early August. According to the Austin American-Statesman, McCraw said the Uvalde County District Attorney requested reinstatement after a grand jury decided not to indict the DPS officers on charges related to the shooting. By reinstating Kindell, McCraw also avoided a public appeals hearing and further scrutiny of the role of DPS officials.
Of course, Mr. McCraw didn’t resign. Instead, he got a raise: Last year, his supervisors at the Texas Commission on Public Safety, all of whom were Abbott appointees, increased Mr. McCraw’s salary by about $45,500, bringing it to more than $345,000.
On the day of his retirement announcement, Aug. 23, McCraw’s PR team released a photo album celebrating his accomplishments. There’s a classic photo opportunity of McCraw aboard a Texas State Police gunboat with Lt. Governor Dan Patrick. There’s also a shot of him distributing food to the National Guard and state guards deployed to the border. But one shot may best capture the moment. Abbott is in the foreground of the photo, but blurred. Wearing his uniform and cowboy hat, and sporting a pensive expression, McCraw is the center of attention. On the same day the photos were released, Abbott kept the spotlight on his appointee. “Steve McCraw is a leader, a visionary, the quintessential Texas law enforcement officer with the big white cowboy hat,” Abbott said of McCraw.
Brett Cross, the father of the boy who died at Robb Elementary School, saw it differently. “Goodbye. You are a disgrace to this state. You are a disgrace to this country,” he wrote to X.
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