Oh, Look! Texas’ Top Cop Finally Retires — On His Own Terms

Because, you know, why listen to the cries of anguished families from Uvalde when you can bask in the applause of freshly minted Texas state troopers in Austin?

Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw announced his retirement Friday, wrapped in a cozy blanket of praise from Gov. Greg Abbott. Not exactly the resignation Uvalde parents demanded two years ago as the DPS's epic failures and falsehoods around the deadliest school shooting in Texas history came to light. But hey, at least it's something, right?

“About time!!” Brett Cross, who lost his son, Uziyah "Uzi" Garcia, in the Uvalde shooting, wrote on social media. “Good riddance.”

But let's not kid ourselves. This is a hollow victory, a neat little bow on McCraw’s career that brushes aside the accountability those grieving families actually deserve.

Accountability would have looked like a full, public airing of the actions of the 91 DPS troopers who stood around for over an hour on May 24, 2022, while a gunman killed 19 kids and two teachers at Robb Elementary School.

But no, the DPS stonewalled. They're 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 termination papers for the Uvalde response (the other trooper retired).

With hundreds of law enforcement officers from various agencies responding to the shooting scene, it's hard to pin the blame on any one officer. But, as I wrote in January, blocking Kindell’s appeal prevented a public hearing that would have opened the entire DPS response to scrutiny. That hope for a reckoning evaporated earlier this month when McCraw quietly reinstated Kindell.

Accountability would also have seen the Public Safety Commission holding McCraw to his 2022 pledge to resign if the DPS had “any culpability” for the botched response. Instead, unbelievably, commissioners praised McCraw last year as they handed him a $45,437 raise, boosting his annual salary to $345,250.

Somehow, between a Texas House committee finding "systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” and the U.S. Justice Department documenting law enforcement’s “cascading failures” at Uvalde, McCraw got a 15% raise.

That pay hike, granted exactly a year ago, upped the average of McCraw’s three highest-earning years, which means a higher monthly pension when he starts drawing his retirement benefits.

“We are truly fortunate to have somebody of the caliber of Steve McCraw as director of the Department of Public Safety,” Public Safety Commission Chair Steven P. Mach said last year. And on Friday, Abbott lauded McCraw as “a leader, visionary, and the quintessential lawman that Texas is so famous for — big, white cowboy hat and all.”

Because who cares about actual justice when you can have a fancy hat, right?

I get it, McCraw spent 15 years leading a massive agency with tough missions, from Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border security effort to highway patrols to the state’s woefully backlogged driver’s license offices.

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

The tragedy in Uvalde wasn’t the totality of McCraw’s tenure. But the failed response and false narratives are indelibly stamped on his legacy, even if the official retirement announcements gloss over it.

Texans won’t forget, and the Uvalde parents who buried their children two years ago won't give up. Nineteen families of the victims sued the DPS and 92 officers in May, seeking the accountability that’s long overdue.

McCraw may be hanging up that distinctive trooper hat on his own terms. But mark my words, his story isn't over yet.

Grumet is the Statesman’s Metro columnist. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@statesman.com or on X at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at statesman.com/opinion/columns.