As Texas state troopers patrol Austin streets in their dark, imposing SUVs, old patterns follow in tow. Data shows that within the first month of the agency’s partnership with the City of Austin, Latino, and Black residents have been arrested for misdemeanors in disproportionate numbers. One traffic stop has already turned deadly: Department of Public Safety (DPS) troopers shot and killed a man just north of Austin this past weekend.
For neighbors in Dallas, the situation feels like history repeating—troopers were sent there in 2019 under the banner of reducing violent crime. By the time they left, they had made more than 1,000 arrests, and one man had lost his life.
Shandra Hodge’s son Schaston was killed on August 17, 2019, by Texas state troopers who were in Dallas with the blessing of Governor Greg Abbott. In the name of fighting violent crime, the troopers swarmed select parts of the city—namely South Dallas—and began pulling people over for slight traffic violations.
In Schaston’s case, he failed to use a turn signal while driving his silver Toyota Camry through his South Dallas neighborhood around 11 p.m. The 27-year-old was on his way home.
After he made his left turn onto a residential street, the patrol car lit up behind him. It followed him through his neighborhood to his home. Body camera footage shows troopers exiting their car and running toward Schaston with their hands on their hip holsters. As Schaston got out of the car at the end of his long driveway, police say he drew a weapon; officers fired. Schaston died with 16 bullet wounds in his body—in his head, torso, and both legs.
“He panicked when he saw [the troopers] because he knew,” Hodge said. “He’s an African-American male, which is who they target. … He was trying to go home, and he was killed at home in the backyard.”
Both troopers—Joshua Engleman and Robert Litvin—were white.
“Police officers are somewhat familiar with what goes on in the community,” Hodge said. “But the troopers came in with a vendetta.”
A grand jury declined to indict the officers in the shooting, and the troopers left Dallas shortly after Schaston’s killing. But the pattern of dropping troopers into cities with the stated goal of curtailing crime has continued with deadly consequences. On Sunday night, troopers attempted to stop a man, whose name was not released, on US-183 in Austin. They then chased the driver into Williamson County, and DPS officials have claimed the man pointed a weapon in troopers’ direction before the troopers fired. The chase and shooting prompted the Texas Rangers to open an investigation. The Williamson County Attorney’s office declined to comment.
“The troopers came in with a vendetta.”
Hodge said she believes Troopers came to Dallas intending to “whip people into shape” and are taking the same violent approach to enforcement in Austin.
“That’s the mentality that the state troopers have,” Hodge continued. “So why are they deploying them in Austin? To whip them into shape.”
In late March, the Austin American-Statesman broke the news that troopers were coming to Austin. The announcement came seemingly out of the blue. Mayor Kirk Watson had been in talks with Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick about public safety in Austin. After a few meetings, the die had been cast.
Starting March 30, Texas DPS would, for an undisclosed amount of time, routinely patrol the city to supplement Austin Police Department’s (APD) forces. As for where they were set to go, officials said the crime data would dictate assignments.
In the first week, DPS averaged 300 traffic stops and 16 arrests per day. But by the end of the partnership’s first month, it became clear that the agency—which is also the workforce behind Abbott’s controversial Operation Lone Star border program—was disproportionately targeting residents of color. The Travis County Attorney’s Office reported 65 percent of DPS misdemeanor arrestees were Latino and 23 percent were Black as of late last month. Travis County is 33 percent Hispanic or Latino and 9 percent Black, according to census data.
Austin officials including APD Chief Joseph Chacon have lauded the partnership for reportedly reducing violent crime in some areas around the city and for appearing to reduce the number of emergency calls for assistance.
On May 2, Austin City Council received an update on the partnership during a council work session—and DPS Executive Director Steven McCraw was in attendance. Watson said the department’s staffing woes had been exacerbated by the February decision not to adopt a new police contract until voters could weigh in on the police oversight measures on the May ballot. (Voters chose overwhelmingly to support citizen oversight during Saturday’s election.) Watson said the partnership with DPS was meant to bridge the gap while the contract was in limbo.
Leadership shared the numbers—780 arrests, 90 crash investigations, and more than 1,000 assists.
“The traffic enforcement, however, has been troubling,” Watson said during the meeting. “If there have been unintended or unwanted consequences, we must address them immediately. We want to ensure Austinites don’t fear that they’ll be racially profiled or targeted by this effort.”
During his presentation, McCraw attempted to assuage concerns that troopers were marching to their own drummer. “We follow the lead of Chief Chacon. We’re not in charge,” he said, adding later, “One thing we do is we patrol actively, and it’s all crime all the time. And that includes traffic enforcement. And that’s just how we handle things. We don’t give troopers the discretion to pick which … traffic laws they enforce and don’t enforce.”
He expressly denied that DPS was engaging in racial profiling, while Chacon said the departments are willing to “shift” their strategy to correct for the “disparate impact on communities of color.”
But many big concerns remain unaddressed. Residents worry about the presence of a police force with a different set of policies and practices. In some cases, the policy differences can be deadly: Troopers were criticized for dangerous chase practices as civil rights groups called for an investigation into Operation Lone Star. The groups said at least 30 people were killed in car chases connected to the program between its inception and July 2022.
APD declined to comment for the story, and DPS did not respond to requests for comment or information.
In Dallas, the patrols—part of the initiative dubbed “Operation D-Town”—caused similar concerns among the public and city leaders.
“That is how you scare people witless, how you lose their trust. How you make them feel like strangers in their own neighborhood,” wrote longtime Dallas Morning News columnist Robert Wilonsky in August 2019.
Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot was among those who didn’t support troopers’ traffic enforcement campaign, although he initially backed their coming to the city to help address the rising murder rate. In hindsight, he told the Texas Observer, “There may have been a temporary effect on public safety but not long-term. There is nothing about stopping people for traffic violations that address the murder rate.”
Creuzot pointed to the low number of guns confiscated during DPS traffic stops—about 120 guns compared to more than 17,000 stops. “Their presence may have generated more community resentment than benefit to public safety,” he said.
Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price said partnerships between law enforcement agencies need delineated responsibilities. In Dallas, police partner with the sheriff’s office for freeway management, allowing DPD officers to focus on community policing and neighborhood patrols. In contrast, with DPS, “they brought in a law enforcement agency that was primarily about mobilizing on the community,” he told the Observer. “As a result, we saw people who were targeted.”
“That is how you scare people witless, how you lose their trust.”
Former Dallas City Council Member Lee Kleinman, who oversaw a community up north, didn’t get any troopers in his district, even though he offered to take them off South Dallas’ hands after leaders pushed back against their heavy concentration there. Despite his willingness to accept troopers, he bristles at the narrative that the DPS partnership is necessary because of short staffing. “They’re not deploying resources [properly],” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff officers can do and a lot of things that private civilians can do that don’t require a sworn officer.”
Dallas attorney Temani Adams has represented multiple residents in cases involving state troopers. She said the biggest problem she saw was her clients being overcharged—in some cases being charged with felonies for offenses that should have been classified as misdemeanors. She had a client who was pulled over by troopers for a problem with his license plate and found to have some marijuana and a firearm.
Rather than taking the case to Creuzot, who notably doesn’t support criminal charges for low-level drug crimes, the troopers took the case to a federal agency. “That happens in bigger cases, but this was a very, very, very small case,” Adams said.
“It was just a big waste of resources,” she said. “We have these cases every day in Dallas.”
Adams also represented Shandra Hodge early on, helping get the video evidence released.
“DPS in Dallas was sort of like a solution in search of a problem,” said Blerim Elmazi, one of the lawyers representing Hodge. Elmazi said the people of South Dallas paid a high price for the mostly low-level citations that Troopers issued: “How many lives were lost? How many people had their rights violated? How many people were racially profiled or harassed by DPS officers in South Dallas? That’s incalculable.”
“He failed to signal”
Shandra Hodge’s coworkers used to jokingly ask what sort of shenanigans “Number Two” was up to. Shaston, the second of three children, was the jolly, rambunctious one, Shandra remembers. He was a straight-talker with his girl cousins, who looked up to him and sought his advice. As an adult, when he would call his mom on the phone, he would yell “Mama” into the phone, holding out the second syllable for a long while.
When Schaston’s younger sister passed away in 2013, he and his mom moved into the family home with Shandra’s grandmother, mother, and sister in Dallas. In 2015, Shandra moved to Houston, but Schaston stayed with his extended family and took care of things around the house—he would make repairs to the car, cook, and buy groceries. He painted the kitchen walls taupe.
“The floor was a mess when he finished, but he did it,” Hodge recalled.
Hodge was living in Houston in 2019, but she said Schaston had mentioned the presence of the troopers in South Dallas before the shooting. He had called her to tell her about how the troopers seemed to be targeting people of color.
She had spoken with her son shortly before the shooting—they talked about nothing in particular. The next call she got was from her mother telling her “they” had shot Schaston. “I didn’t know who ‘they’ was,” Hodge said.
She threw some things in a bag and started to drive to Dallas. Her cousin called her while she was driving to tell her it was state troopers who had shot Schaston, that they had “killed [her] baby.” “Then I lost it,” she said. “I pulled over in the Woodlands and just started screaming.”
When she arrived at the scene, she said officers treated her harshly. “I was like, ‘What happened?’ They said he failed to signal, and I stood there and said, ‘So you actually killed him because he failed to signal?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, he failed to signal.’”
A couple of months later, Texas Rangers returned Schaston’s shirt—bloodied and torn—to his mother. She remembers the Ranger shrugged and told her, as if it were a silver lining, “It could have been one of [the officers’] wives” he was returning personal belongings to.
“Whether justice comes at the end of the day, that has yet to be determined.”
Around the two-year anniversary of Schaston’s death, his mother filed a lawsuit against the two deputies involved. The suit was dismissed, but her lawyers have filed an appeal and are waiting on the new judgment. “To shoot someone 16 times is an execution,” Hodge said.
“Whether justice comes at the end of the day, that has yet to be determined,” Elmazi said. “But we told [Hodge], there is some level of accountability by just serving that lawsuit and making them answer for what they did.”
Hodge now lives in the house with her mother and sister, the same one Schaston died trying to enter. She can’t go into the backyard to this day.
“There’s no way [troopers] should have ever been deployed to a neighborhood to man whatever is going on there,” Hodge said. “I think if it would have been the Dallas Police Department, the outcome would have been totally different. With DPS coming in, they are already scared because they were not trained. So anything that happened that was out of the norm for them, they’ll shoot now and ask questions later.”
