Efforts to limit police transparency by shielding some complaints from public view have failed multiple times during the 2025 legislative season—most recently in the form of House Bill 15, which died this week—fueled ultimately by proponents’ unwillingness to alter the sweeping language of the proposed bills in any substantial way.
Republican state Senator Phil King filed nearly identical bills in the regular and two special sessions, with similar or identical bills being filed in the House. The bills, if passed into law, would have created confidential catch-all “department files” for records not contained in officers’ personnel files, including unsubstantiated and uninvestigated complaints. Many Texas cities already keep some records including unfounded complaints in a confidential “G-File,” but the proposed measures would have created a more expansive secret file and implemented it statewide.
The proposal is “the zombie that keeps coming back,” said Alycia Castillo, associate director of policy with the nonprofit Texas Civil Rights Project.
“I think that the way [HB 15] went down is a really good sign,” she told the Texas Observer. “We’re hopeful that it means it doesn’t come back again, and that we can preserve some level of transparency for all Texans, because they deserve it.”
HB 15, filed by Republican Cole Hefner in August, passed through the House of Representatives last month with two amendments: one added by Democrat Joe Moody that ensured the bill wouldn’t reopen the “dead suspect loophole” the Legislature closed in 2023, and another by Representative Don McLaughlin, former mayor of Uvalde, who successfully argued that families affected by the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School are entitled to records potentially rendered confidential by the bill.
Uvalde families and members of the news media have filed multiple lawsuits to gain access to records related to the botched police response to the shooting, in which hundreds of officers showed up to the scene, including more than 90 state troopers from the Department of Public Safety (DPS), but no one took any action against the shooter for well over an hour. The shooter, a former student, killed nineteen students and two teachers in that time.
Courts have repeatedly sided with those seeking access to these records. The Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office and the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District agreed to release documents as part of a court settlement last year. DPS continues to fight to keep its records secret, and an appeals court ruling could come any day. Most relevant complaints could have been deemed confidential under the proposed bills.
But when HB 15 and its amendments reached the Senate, legislators wiped away the edits in committee without hearing any public testimony. When the bill made its way back to the lower chamber, the House declined to vote on the Senate’s changes, and both bodies adjourned sine die as Wednesday night wore into Thursday morning.
Kathy Mitchell, a senior advisor with the criminal justice policy nonprofit Equity Action who has called the bills a “massive secrecy grab,” told the Observer the Uvalde amendment was “an important acknowledgement that sometimes seeing the records … will give families some kind of closure.” She said the fact the amendments were stripped away before even making it to the upper chamber’s floor for discussion meant most senators didn’t have the chance to consider the change. Instead, the Senate ended up pushing forward the same bill it pushed in the previous sessions.
“The Senate took the position that this bill is perfect, and we will only accept it in its original perfect form,” Mitchell said. “That’s not how lawmaking should work.”
Lawmakers and proponents of the bills—including the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE) and the state’s largest police union—marketed them as a way to standardize police personnel file practices throughout the state. Since 1973, police personnel files have generally been open to the public under state law, but nearly 80 cities have adopted the carveout known as the G-File (referring to the Texas Local Government Code subsection that created them). The G-File is part of a state civil service law, meant to protect law enforcement and fire departments from damaging employment practices, that voters in a municipality must approve.
Most of the largest cities in Texas maintain G-files, though Dallas does not, and Austin, while a civil service city, did away with its G-file through an unusual 2023 vote and a subsequent police union contract.
Critics of this year’s proposed bills argued that they would give departments access to a new black-box “department file” where they could squirrel away embarrassing or sensitive records. The broad language in the bills was challenged multiple times, most recently causing Governor Greg Abbott to edit his special session call to include the scope of the proposal after House Democrats pointed out that bill language brought to the floor did not match up with the governor’s stated priorities.
Opponents of both the bills and the existing G-File practice also argue that, even if only unsubstantiated complaints are withheld, the public still loses out on troves of crucial information about how law enforcement operates. As executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, Lauren Bonds, told the Observer last month: Access only to complaints that resulted in discipline provides “a very, very small snapshot of the types of problems that people might be having.”
The post Police ‘Secrecy Grab’ Dies After Senate Refuses Uvalde Compromise appeared first on The Texas Observer.
This post was originally authored and published by Michelle Pitcher from the , a nonprofit investigative news outlet and magazine. Sign up for their , or follow them on and .
