Does the DPS Look Like Texas?
If you review the selection process, it’s hard to directly compare the group of officers who became captains against those who stayed lieutenants. One applicant, a Hispanic woman, was said to have been blackballed because of her alleged sexual orientation, but other officers claim her leadership skills were lacking. On the other hand, one officer among the winners had a laundry list of departmental complaints, including a record of poor supervisory skills and fiscal irregularities — but he was lucky enough to be a hunting buddy of a high DPS official. In retrospect, the question is not really who got the jobs so much as it is the process that was followed to predetermine the promotion of particular officers. The cooked exam and its fallout come at a particularly bad time for the department. DPS is in institutional flux. The mainstay of crime detection, fingerprints, is increasingly out of fashion because of growing questions about reliability: Now the agency is being pushed to get cri
