McCraw ends DPS tenure without accountability for Uvalde

When you’re the chief of police in Texas, you can leave on your own terms.

Not amid the cries of the anguished families of Uvalde, but to the applause of those gathered in Austin for the graduation of the new generation of Texas state troopers.

Friday’s announcement by Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw, wrapped in praise from Gov. Greg Abbott, is not the resignation Uvalde parents demanded two years ago when the department’s failures and false narratives surrounding the deadliest school shooting in Texas history came painfully to light. Still, some took comfort in McCraw’s departure.

“About time!” Brett Cross, who lost his son, Uziyah “Uzi” Garcia, in the Uvalde shooting, wrote on social media Friday about the DPS director’s retirement. “Go well.”

Still, it’s a hollow coda to the Uvalde tragedy, a neatly wrapped ending to McCraw’s career that sidesteps the responsibility the grieving families deserve.

Accountability would have been a full, public disclosure of the actions of the 91 DPS troopers who stood by for more than an hour on May 24, 2022, while a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

Instead, DPS has maintained a noncommittal stance. The department is still fighting 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 firing orders for the response to Uvalde (the other officer has since retired).

With hundreds of law enforcement officers from multiple agencies responding to the shooting scene, each officer’s culpability is up for debate. But, as I wrote in January, blocking Kindell’s appeal prevented the matter from reaching a public hearing that would have opened the entire DPS response to scrutiny. Any hope of that reckoning evaporated earlier this month, when McCraw quietly reinstated Kindell.

The onus would also have been on the Public Safety Commission to force McCraw to live up to his 2022 promise to resign if DPS bore “any blame” for the botched response. Instead, incredibly, the commissioners praised McCraw last year by giving him a $45,437 raise, bringing his annual salary to $345,250.

Somehow, between a Texas House committee finding “systemic failures and egregious decision-making” and the U.S. Department of Justice documenting “cascading failures” by law enforcement in Uvalde, McCraw was rewarded with a 15% raise.

That pay increase, 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 begins collecting his retirement benefits.

“We are truly fortunate to have someone of Steve McCraw’s caliber as head of the Department of Public Safety,” Public Safety Committee Chairman Steven P. Mach said last year. And on Friday, Abbott praised McCraw as “a leader, a visionary and the quintessential lawman that Texas is so famous for, big white cowboy hat and all.”

Wow. Good thing our DPS boss looked the part.

I acknowledge that McCraw spent 15 years leading a vast agency tasked with challenging missions, from directing Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border security to running highway patrols and operating the state’s woefully backlogged driver’s license offices.

“There is no more important responsibility in government than ensuring the safety of our citizens,” McCraw wrote in his letter announcing his retirement. Leading DPS, he added, “has been the greatest honor of my life.”

The Uvalde tragedy did not span the entirety of McCraw’s tenure, but the botched response and false narratives are indelibly imprinted on his legacy, even if official retirement announcements say not a word about it.

Texans will not forget, and the Uvalde parents who buried their children two years ago will not give up. Nineteen families of the victims sued DPS and 92 troopers in May, hoping for much-needed accountability in the courts.

McCraw may be hanging up his distinctive police hat on his own terms, but his story is not over.

Grumet is a columnist for the Statesman’s metropolitan section. His column, ATX in Context, contains his opinions. Share yours by email at [email protected] or X at @bgrumet. Find his previous work at statesman.com/opinion/columns.

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McCraw ends DPS tenure without accountability for Uvalde

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