In a civil trial beginning Monday, the city of Austin will respond to allegations of a “culture of impunity” in the city’s police department — after a lawsuit claimed misconduct has gone relatively unchecked.
In 2021, Alex Gonzales Jr. was fatally shot in an “apparent road rage incident” with officers Gabriel Gutierrez and Luis Serrato, FOX 7 Austin reported. A year after his death, Gonzales’ parents and former girlfriend, who was with Gonzales the night of his death, filed a civil lawsuit against Gutierrez and Serrato.
In December 2022, the Travis County grand jury declined to indict Gutierrez and Serrato. A few months later, an internal APD investigation concluded that its officers did not violate any department policy. But, Gonzales’ mother has successfully brought the federal civil lawsuit to trial by invoking the Monell doctrine, a decades-old legal standard that holds cities liable for systemic misconduct committed by civil servants.
It is “exceedingly difficult” to successfully win a Monell claim, legal scholar Joanna Schwartz wrote in the Columbia Law Review. These cases most often argue that municipalities are responsible for officer misconduct not through a formally unconstitutional policy, but rather through informal practices or a routine failure to “properly screen, train, supervise, or investigate their officers.”
So, it was a rare move in March when U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman allowed the civil suit to proceed. In his opinion, Pitman found “sufficient evidence” that Austin had employed a “longstanding practice of under-investigating and under-disciplining officers for excessive force.”
“The city’s custom of not enforcing its intervention policy could evince an official, albeit unwritten, unconstitutional city practice,” Pitman continued.
From 1984 to 2020, NAACP Austin identified 24 “questionable” deaths resulting from excessive use of police force. And in just a decade, misconduct lawsuits cost the city $73 million in settlements and legal fees, the Austin-American Statesman reported.