The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has abandoned its pursuit of state funding for a new active-shooter training facility.
DPS Director Steve McCraw told The Texas Tribune that the agency needed to upgrade its existing facilities, which he claimed do not currently have adequate housing amenities:
“We’re just looking in terms of across the board — what are we focused on? The problem with the phased approach that focuses on a reality-based training facility [is] … we still don’t have any place to put people. You’ve got to have a place to sleep. You’ve got to have a place to eat.”
McCraw originally proposed a $1.2 billion remodeling of a roughly 200-acre DPS complex in Williamson County into a state-of-the-art facility to be used by all Texas law enforcement agencies for active-shooter training, according to The Texas Tribune.
The idea for the facility was not dissimilar to the law enforcement training center being built in Atlanta, Georgia, which has been dubbed “Cop City” by detractors.
Last Thursday, at a meeting of the Senate Finance Committee, McCraw testified that he was taking the project off the table and instead pursuing $381.5 million of taxpayer money in upgrades to the agency’s campus near Waco. There was no voiced opposition to the move, according to The Texas Tribune.
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, protests against the new building in Atlanta escalated into riots in late January after police allegedly killed a protester in an exchange of gunfire.
Environmentalists and anti-police activists in Georgia claimed that constructing the new training center would harm urban forests and result in more policing.
While it is unclear if DPS’ change of plans was influenced by events in Atlanta, the agency has been dealing with controversy from its handling of the Uvalde school shooting in May 2022.
The Dallas Express reached out to DPS and asked whether its change of plans was in any way due to fear over anti-police protests around the proposed site for the facility. No response was received by press time.
