Investigator of Complaints Against Police Calls Complainant “Protester Dirtbag”

Photo by John Anderson

The Office of Police Oversight official tasked with supervising investigations into community complaints against police officers referred to one of those complainants as a “protester dirtbag,” internal emails show.

Police oversight advocates said the incident is concerning, especially combined with Chronicle reporting that revealed a majority of the OPO staff tasked with investigating community complaints against police officers were once police officers themselves.

Daniel Ellis, the individual at OPO tasked with overseeing all investigations into community complaints against police officers, has spent about 40% of his five-decade professional life working in law enforcement or military roles.

He’s also the OPO staffer who referred to the complainant as a “dirtbag.”

“OPO is supposed to be an independent body where community members can go for help if they feel they were mistreated by a police officer,” Nelly Paulina Ramirez, who chairs the city’s Public Safety Commission, said. “The experience is supposed to feel different from filing a complaint with the police department. I worry that might not be the case with investigative officers [at OPO] who have such heavy law enforcement backgrounds, and this incident confirms that fear.”

The allegation against OPO Complaints Supervisor Daniel Ellis first surfaced in an email sent by Mia Demers, OPO’s public safety compliance manager, to Gail McCant, the agency’s director, on May 2 – one day after dozens of pro-Palestine protesters were arrested during a demonstration on the University of Texas campus. In the email, Demers relayed concerns from an unnamed OPO employee to McCant.

Demers said the employee felt “[Ellis] was unprofessional and was not being impartial in his role when they noticed that [Ellis] made an entry into the shared database that referred to the complainant as a ‘protester dirtbag,’” Demers wrote, referencing the system OPO and the Austin Police Department use to track investigations into complaints against officers.

Ellis is responsible for supervising the investigations into complaints against police officers carried out by his two full-time complaints investigators. The work of OPO’s complaints division has experienced a great deal of turbulence over the past two years thanks to changes in their legal authority to investigate complaints as a result of the Austin Police Association’s successful effort to weaken oversight. Due to this turbulence, metrics measuring OPO’s investigative work have lagged behind prior years when the office held more authority. (For example, an analysis this year found that over a three month period, OPO had only referred six complaints to APD, which is roughly 10 times fewer complaints than the office referred to APD each quarter in 2021.)

Passage of the Austin Police Oversight Act and a court ruling declaring one of its most vital provisions – that the city cannot maintain a secret police misconduct file known as the “G file” – have stabilized the legal framework underlying OPO’s authority to investigate community complaints. Late last year, OPO began staffing up its complaint division, inspiring hope that the office might once again carry out the kind of robust, independent investigations of alleged officer misconduct that it had done in years past.

But the law enforcement backgrounds of OPO’s complaints team have dampened that hope. Oversight advocates fear that that experience might bias civilian investigators against people who complain about police conduct. Kathy Mitchell, an adviser to Equity Action – the justice advocacy organization that wrote the Oversight Act – told us in August that “the most important value for OPO is independence from police.”

Ellis writing that a complainant is a “dirtbag” in the person’s official casefile, which is visible to OPO staff and APD internal affairs investigators, validates that fear, the advocates told us.

The email Demers sent to McCant notes that the OPO complaints team did not take issue with Ellis’ decision to dismiss the complaint. (The emails we obtained through a public records request do not include specifics about the protester’s complaint.) But the unnamed employee was troubled by Ellis’ conduct enough to share their concern with Demers. That employee also told Demers that they chose not to go to Ellis directly because they feared retaliation, per the email.

Shortly after receiving the tip about Ellis’ comment, McCant wrote to a human resources employee that she had confirmed that Ellis left the “dirtbag protester” comment in the complainant’s casefile – though most of McCant’s message is spent recounting an experiment she conducted to test if someone else could have left the comment under Ellis’ name. “According to Daniel [Ellis], he did not enter the information into the system,” McCant wrote, though he did leave his laptop in the conference room with other OPO staff while he stepped outside to take a phone call. McCant seems to imply that one of the other team members could have left the comment.

“Daniel is accountable for any actions performed on the system using his credentials,” McCant wrote, adding that the city’s device usage policy prohibits users from leaving city-issued devices unattended and accessible by others. McCant wrote that the comment was “not impartial nor neutral” and that it “set a negative example” for how OPO should conduct its work. “It is important that we provide impartial oversight of APD practices and remain unbiased in our dealings with community members,” McCant wrote. “This kind of behavior is not in line with those expectations.”

McCant declined an interview to discuss the incident (in fact, McCant has not done an interview with any news outlet in the year since she assumed leadership of OPO). In a statement, she said the incident was “investigated and addressed.” In the statement, she declined to elaborate, because the incident involved a personnel matter. She added that OPO staff are “required to be impartial and unbiased in their work” and that staff at every level are “supervised by experienced administrators and oversight practitioners to ensure transparency and accountability.”

Public Safety Commission Chair Nelly Paulina Ramirez says she accepts McCant’s statement that the situation has been addressed, but she still has questions. She wants to know if the bias she says Ellis demonstrated in the “dirtbag” incident affected his supervision of other complaints investigations.

“The next time OPO comes to the Public Safety Commission, we’ll be asking questions,” Paulina Ramirez said.