AUSTIN — Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, is retiring at the end of the year.
McCraw announced his retirement at a cadet graduation ceremony Friday morning.
“The greatest honor of my life is to have served as the director of the Department of Public Safety for over 15 years,” McCraw said.
McCraw began with DPS in 1977 as a highway patrol trooper before becoming a narcotics agent. He moved to the FBI, where he served as a special agent in charge of the San Antonio office and helped establish the bureau’s office of intelligence after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
McCraw retired from the FBI in 2004 and was appointed Texas homeland security director for Gov. Rick Perry, who named him head of DPS in 2009.
Gov. Greg Abbott praised McCraw at the ceremony for his encyclopedic knowledge of transnational gangs and his agency’s actions to quell recent pro-Palestine protests at the University of Texas at Austin.
“It has been an honor to work with Director McCraw all these years,” Abbott said. “His leadership, his flexibility to meet the changing needs of law enforcement has truly revolutionized the Texas Department of Public Safety.”
McCraw faced intense scrutiny after the botched police response to the May 24, 2022, Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, including the inaction of dozens of DPS troopers who responded. Officers from multiple police agencies waited more than an hour to enter a classroom to confront and kill the gunman who fatally shot 19 students and two teachers.
McCraw, who was not in Uvalde during the attack, called the police response an “abject failure” but resisted calls from victims’ families and some Texas lawmakers to step down after the shooting. Scathing state and federal investigative reports catalogued “cascading failures” in training, communication, leadership and technology problems.
At a news conference a few days after the shooting, McCraw choked back tears in describing emergency calls and texts from students inside the classroom. He blamed the police delay on the local schools police chief, who McCraw said was the on-scene incident commander in charge of the response.
McCraw did not elaborate during his remarks on the decision to step down. In a letter to agency employees, he praised their courage but did not mention Uvalde or any other specific police action during his tenure.
“Your bravery and willingness to face danger head-on have garnered the admiration and support of our leadership, Legislature and the people of Texas,” McCraw wrote.
State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents Uvalde, said McCraw should have been forced out soon after the massacre. McCraw’s troopers were “armed to the teeth” but “stood around and failed to confront the shooter,” he said.
“McCraw’s legacy will always be the failure in Uvalde, and one day, he will be brought to justice for his inaction,” Gutierrez said.
McCraw is among the most visible agency heads in Texas. The leader of the state police department, which includes the highway patrol and the storied Texas Rangers, McCraw has often been seen beside Abbott at state emergency briefings and at the Capitol, where lawmakers routinely call upon the DPS chief to testify on law enforcement matters.
He was also instrumental in creating the DPS Fallen Officers Memorial at the agency’s Austin headquarters, a monument Abbott said was a “legacy to Col. Steve McCraw.”
”He is a leader, a visionary and a quintessential lawman that Texas is so famous for — big white cowboy hat and all,” Abbott said.
McCraw said his decision to retire was made easier by his confidence in the people who make up DPS.
”We’re in great hands because of the people we have, the leaders that we have in this department, because we’re not an agency of a person, we’re an agency of people, of dedicated and selfless, dedicated professionals that always get the job done,” he said.
McCraw will remain DPS director through the end of the year while the Public Safety Commission selects his replacement. Details on that process will be made available “in the coming days,” the agency said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
