San Antonio’s feces sandwich cop illustrates broken accountability system

Few disagreed that San Antonio police officer Matthew Luckhurst’s behavior was appalling. It still took the agency four years to get rid of him. In 2016, Luckhurst, a bike patrol officer, gave a homeless man a sandwich with dog feces inside it. A month later, after a female officer requested the women’s bathroom be kept clean, he and another policeman responded by defecating in the toilet without flushing, then spreading “a brown substance with the consistency of tapioca” on the seat. The department fired Luckhurst several months after the sandwich incident — “a vile and disgusting act that violates our guiding principles,” the chief said then. But he was reinstated in 2019 after an arbitrator concluded the department had missed a 180-day legal window to discipline him.

Luckhurst appealed again when he was re-canned for the second feces-related incident. In June 2020 an arbitrator agreed the police department was justified in the dismissal. “This individual clearly has no business wearing an SAPD uniform,” City Manager Erik Walsh said. Under the state’s weak and fragmented system of holding police accountable, however, that didn’t mean Luckhurst couldn’t wear another Texas law enforcement uniform. State records show the Floresville Police Department, 30 miles outside of San Antonio, hired Luckhurst as a reserve officer five months after his final firing. Although reserve officers hold the same legal authority as any law enforcement officer, different departments use them differently, so it is unclear what role Luckhurst has in Floresville. He could not be reached for comment and Chief Lorenzo Herrera did not return multiple messages left at his office. But the fact that Luckhurst can still carry a gun and wear a badge illustrates why the state’s disciplinary process for bad cops needs to be completely overhauled, according to a new state report. “The state’s regulation of law enforcement personnel and agencies is, by and large, toothless,” the Sunset Advisory Commission concluded in a recent deep-dive study of the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, the agency responsible for licensing police and corrections officers. The commission typically evaluates state agencies once every 10 years, identifying improvements for the Legislature to consider. But the new report is the second in three years after lawmakers could not agree on changes suggested in the 2020 Sunset review of the law enforcement agency. The findings of the latest audit, released last month, largely mirror those from the earlier version. Since then, the most recent evaluation said, pressure for urgent reforms to police training and oversight has only continued to mount thanks to incidents such as the poor law enforcement response to May’s school shooting in Uvalde, when hundreds of officers responded but waited more than an hour before confronting the shooter.