Sixth Street patrons could avoid trouble if they understood the police's role.

A night out on the town in Austin means a night downtown and, if you're like most of the young shakers in town, it definitely means a night cruising the East Sixth Street entertainment district – the veritable heart of the city. Sixth Street is a cornucopia of good-looking party people, bars, and cheap drinks. In fact, there are nearly 50 bars to choose from, all within six city blocks! Many even feature 25-cent shots or pitchers of beer – and with all those 25-cent shots to choose from, and all those roaming eyes to connect with (or not), there's one other fixture of the Sixth Street scene that party patrons can't do without: the police. When your chips are down and your dinner's about to come up, there's definitely no one you'd rather see than a blue-uniformed APD officer.

"People sometimes don't understand this, but we're here to keep the party going," said Sgt. Leonard "Lucky" Ledbetter, a 15-year APD veteran who oversees the Street's night-shift patrol officers. According to Ledbetter, some patrons misunderstand the police mission down on the Street. Woefully, Ledbetter says that many visitors to the city's most famous street think that the police assigned to patrol the revelry have little or no respect for the partiers and that the police often use their will and, occasionally, too much force in their quest to keep the street safe. "I've heard all kind of complaints – that we're somehow arbitrary and target people just for being obnoxious, or that we are intolerant and will arrest people for no good reason, just for looking at an officer wrong," he said, "and that's just not true."

Indeed, 20-year-old Justin Taveress, an engineering major at UT, said that's exactly how the police treated him last weekend. Taveress said he left the Triple Shot bar sometime after midnight on Saturday and was walking down the 400 block of East Sixth Street when he was confronted by an officer – identified by Taveress as Officer J. Kostek – who asked him what he was looking at. "I said I wasn't looking at anything and that I was just walking back to my car," Taveress recalled. "I stared up at the guy – he was really big, and kind of sweaty – and he looked at me and said that I had "disobeyed a lawful order.' I didn't know what he was talking about, and I told him that. That's when he told me that I was resisting arrest." Taveress spent nine hours in jail before being released.

Ledbetter said that he is familiar with Taveress' arrest and the subsequent excessive force complaint that the student filed with the department's Internal Affairs Division. In addition, Ledbetter said that Taveress' recollection of his encounter with Kostek – a four-year veteran of the department who cut his rookie teeth cleaning weapons in the department's ordinance unit and has only six civilian complaints on his record – is completely distorted. According to Ledbetter, who arrived at the scene as the UT student was being cuffed, Taveress was clearly intoxicated when he encountered Kostek near the corner of Sixth and Trinity streets. "Kostek – who was not intoxicated at the time – reported that Taveress walked right into him, repeatedly bumping into the officer while trying to walk east along the sidewalk," Ledbetter recalled. "It was as if he was trying to walk right through the officer. When Taveress couldn't move forward, he bent over slightly at the waist and, leading with his shoulder – as if he was a human battering ram – attempted to move through Kostek with a considerable amount of force."

Ledbetter said that Kostek sustained minor injuries during the encounter, including an elbow-shaped bruise near his groin. Still, Kostek remained calm, Ledbetter said, politely asking Taveress to "cease and desist" several times before placing the drunken, underage student under arrest. "We don't want to arrest people," Ledbetter said, "but sometimes we have no choice." Taveress insists that the police account of the event is "a bunch of lies." Taveress admits that he'd had a "little bit too much" to drink (and that he used his older brother's old driver's license to gain access to the over-21 bar where he'd been drinking – a crime that Taveress was not charged with), but says that he never bumped into the officer – that, he said, is something he'd remember, no matter how much he'd been drinking. "It didn't happen that way," he said sternly. "That cop was looking to bust heads, and he chose mine."

Ledbetter said that the Taveress incident is a perfect example of what police face every weekend while working the East Sixth Street beat. "We're working, soberly facing our task, which is to patrol a population hopped up on booze – and, occasionally, other controlled substances," he said. "This is the sole reason that we are regularly accused of misconduct: It is a fact that alcohol affects memory, so it's no wonder these people can't accurately recount what led to their incarcerations." In general, civilians are unfamiliar with the state's laws, Ledbetter said, so it is no surprise that when you add alcohol to the mix they can't "tell the difference between a misdemeanor or felony violation and what they imagine are "made up' violations."

In other words, he explained, drunken revelers simply don't remember what law they've broken, which often leads them to believe that they've landed in jail unfairly, or causes them to believe that various injuries – scrapes, bruises, the occasional broken rib – were caused by police action and not by their own drunken clumsiness. "It's a real frustrating situation," Ledbetter said.

APD Assistant Chief Diane Boudreaux, who oversees the city's downtown policing operations, said she is tired of the constant complaining and has come up with a two-part plan that she believes will end the squabbling and misconceptions about the way police patrol the city's most popular entertainment district. Indeed, city officials have already lent Boudreaux their ears and have fulfilled the first part of her plan, purchasing nearly 1,000 stun-guns in an effort to help police avoid trouble before it gets started. "The idea is that when an officer comes into contact with an intoxicated patron, who will likely ignore an officer's lawful orders, and then more than likely resist an officer's arrest attempt, the officer will have the ability to pull out their stun weapon to gain compliance in a more efficient manner," she said. "This will help us police more efficiently and should equalize the ever-present possibility that either the officer or the Sixth Street patron will be injured, such as happened in the Taveress case."

Indeed, Boudreaux cites recent studies – conducted and produced by the Omaha, Neb.-based stun-gun company CompliaStun Inc., from which the city of Austin purchased the bulk of their stun weapons – that suggest a mild electric jolt actually helps to sober up intoxicated suspects. "According to the research, the electric current has a neutralizing effect on a person's blood alcohol content," she said. The research, she said, is "very exciting and encouraging," and she said she believes the positive effects of stun-gun use will be reflected in the latest police complaint statistics compiled by the city's Police Monitoring Tribunal Office, which she expects will be released later this month.

Meanwhile, Boudreaux said she is preparing a presentation for the City Council that outlines the second phase of her so-called Police-Civilian Harmony Initiative, which involves purchasing nearly 1,000 new nametag cameras. The small video cameras – as small as the tip of a medium-point, Bic brand pen – will be installed within the nameplate that officers wear on their uniforms. In private, Boudreaux admits that police administrators jokingly refer to the nametag cams as "intoxi-cams" – but the positive impact that the new technology will have on police relations on Sixth Street is no laughing matter. "Seriously, we are confident that the nametag cams will allow us to show the citizens who believe they were arrested in error the actual footage of the conduct that led to their arrest," she said. Boudreaux said that, so far, her cam proposal has received positive feedback from officials in City Hall; however, she said, it is unlikely that the plan will receive the official go-ahead until sometime this fall. "In the meantime," she said, "the best advice I have to offer Sixth Street patrons is that they should be sure to comply with an officer's orders. That's the best way to avoid trouble."

Word Wars

What APD likes to hear