In 1998, the San Antonio Police Department (SAPD) began requiring officers to fill out reports any time they had to use force, a big step toward tracking when and why police resorted to strong-arming residents of the state’s then-third largest city. Members of the public, including reporters, could already access incident reports and offense reports—which had been public by law for decades—but these new documents could offer a more detailed look into how officers were reacting to tense situations.
That same year, a young San Antonio Express-News reporter named John Tedesco asked to see the use of force reports, but the department declined. SAPD had tucked these particular reports away in confidential files, separate from officers’ main personnel files, shielding them from the prying eyes of the public.
This secret file, commonly referred to as the “G-file” because of the subsection of the Texas Local Government Code that created it, was meant to be a repository for what lawmakers considered to be the most sensitive law enforcement and fire department personnel records, including those related to unsubstantiated misconduct complaints. Under Texas open records law on the books since 1973, Police officers’ general personnel files are public, but the G-file has served as a carve-out since the late ’80s.
In 1999, the Texas Attorney General’s Office sided with the Express-News, but the San Antonio police still refused to release the documents until an appeals court finally ruled that the department had no reason to put the records in a confidential file. “San Antonio spent thousands of taxpayer dollars on legal fees to withhold information from the public—and kept losing at every turn,” Tedesco told the Texas Observer in early August. He said the records allowed him to look at trends in use-of-force data, resulting in stories about problematic officers and units, as well as analyses of racial disparities.
This legal fight exemplified what’s proven true in the ensuing decades: Allowing police departments the discretion to silo off certain parts of police personnel records is a recipe for abuse. The headlines over the San Antonio legal fight may have run alongside coverage of the coming Y2K disaster, but the issue is no thing of the past.
In his agenda for the current special legislative session, Governor Greg Abbott called for “legislation that protects law enforcement officers from public disclosure of unsubstantiated complaints in personnel files.” Lawmakers in both chambers swiftly filed bills to meet the governor’s demand, SB 14 and HB 14—repeats of measures that failed to pass in the earlier regular session. The proposed legislation would shield large swaths of records about officers—including complaints of misconduct that didn’t result in discipline—from public view. This would allow hundreds of departments that would have previously disclosed these records to keep them secret.
The state Senate passed SB 14 on Tuesday, but the House remains at a standstill as Democrats maintain a quorum break in protest of proposed congressional redistricting, setting up a likely additional special session (and possibly even more).
The bills, which are being presented as a way to standardize personnel records in departments across the state, are based on a model created by the regulatory agency the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE). Critics say the measure could have devastating consequences for police transparency.
“This is the most massive secrecy grab in Texas since the adoption of the Public Information Act,” Kathy Mitchell, senior advisor with the criminal justice policy nonprofit Equity Action, told the Observer.
Transparency advocates like Mitchell point out that many Texas police departments currently operate without a G-file—and without the sky falling. Only municipalities whose voters have adopted the state’s civil service law for police and firefighters actually have the secret police files, and most of these votes occurred around the middle of the 20th century, prior to 1989 when the G-file was added to that statute. Seventy-eight Texas municipalities fall into this civil service category, including most major cities: Houston, San Antonio, and Austin—but not Dallas, where the public has access to unsubstantiated misconduct complaints.
Meanwhile, statewide groups that support the reduction in police transparency—including TCOLE and the state’s largest police union the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT)—point to this very variance across cities as the reason for the current legislation. In August, SB 14 was heard before the Senate State Affairs Committee. “The legislative intent behind these model policies was to establish a standardization of the way we do things in law enforcement in certain areas where we lack standardization,” said Jennifer Szimansky, deputy executive director of CLEAT.
Throughout the hearing, lawmakers and bill proponents repeatedly stated that the measure would only protect officers’ sensitive personal information and regularize practices across the state. Prominent representatives from Dallas, the largest Texas city that doesn’t maintain a G-file, showed up to testify on the bill. Lieutenant Jonathan Blanchard with the Dallas Police Department spoke in favor, on behalf of the department, emphasizing the need to keep things like sick days and vacation time confidential.
But the wording of the proposed legislation has raised alarms for advocates, who say it would not only spread the existing G-file system to more cities but would essentially super-size the secret file: creating a catch-all “department file” to ferret away even more information about police misconduct. The bill states the file would contain documents including “any letter, memorandum, or document relating to the license holder not included in a personnel file.”
Other opponents worried the bill would make it more difficult for citizens to successfully level complaints and that it didn’t account for all the agencies and people who should legally have access to the information, including independent oversight boards and the Legislature itself.
“SB 14 should be named the ‘Protect Bad Cops and Let the People Eat Cake Act,’” said CJ Grisham, a retired federal agent, right-wing activist, and civil rights attorney.
The details of the legislation may still change, but underlying any minor modifications is a fundamental debate about whether unsubstantiated complaints should see the light of day. Proponents say unconfirmed complaints can show patterns of behavior on the part of an officer and the department. According to the National Police Accountability Project, most civilian complaints are deemed unsubstantiated, regardless of whether the officer violated policy. The executive director of that project, Lauren Bonds, said access only to complaints that resulted in discipline provides “a very, very small snapshot of the types of problems that people might be having.”
Similar concerns hold for records related to county jailers. “‘Unsubstantiated’ doesn’t mean ‘false,’” said Krishnaveni Gundu, executive director of the Texas Jail Project. “‘Unsubstantiated’ could also mean ‘did not get a thorough investigation,’ or maybe ‘it wasn’t investigated at all.’”
Michael Bullock, president of the Austin Police Association, testified at the hearing that the capital city should serve as a cautionary tale about the need for legislation shielding unsubstantiated complaints.
In 2023, local voters passed the Austin Police Oversight Act, which effectively opened up the previously confidential G-file. After about a year of pushback from the department and the police union—and following a judge’s order that the records must be released—city officials agreed to open up the G-file. This promise was written into a 5-year contract between the city and the police union, which was signed in 2024 after protracted negotiations. In his testimony, Bullock said that Austin officers “are being tried in a court of public opinion before they ever have a chance to get a fair trial” and urged state lawmakers to overrule the transparency outlined in his own union contract.
As originally filed, SB 14 contained a carve-out that specifically grandfathered in existing union contract provisions about disclosure of police files. That language was removed in committee, but the bill still allows disclosure “as required by law.” In a floor exchange that Austin state Senator Sarah Eckhardt had entered into the written record, bill author Phil King stated the new language was still meant to protect union contract provisions—including those agreed to going forward.
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