JUSTICE DEVINE delivered the opinion of the Court. JUSTICE BUSBY filed a concurring opinion, in which Justice Lehrmann and Justice Devine joined. When police officers act in good faith while performing discretionary duties within the scope of their authority, the common law shields them from personal liability and, in turn, the relevant statutory waiver of their governmental employer’s immunity from civil suit does not apply.[1] At issue in this interlocutory appeal is whether an officer was acting in good faith when, while turning in pursuit of a suspected felon fleeing in a stolen vehicle, the patrol car hit the street curb and struck a pickup truck waiting at a stop sign. Relying solely on the officer’s statement that he “hit the curb due to the brakes not working,” the court of appeals held that a fact issue precluded summary judgment for the city because the officer’s testimony was silent about when he became aware that the brakes were not functioning and the risks of driving with defective brakes.[2] We disagree and conclude that, as a matter of law, the officer was acting in good faith when he executed the turn and collided with the bystander’s truck. Although we indulge every reasonable inference from the summary-judgment evidence in the nonmovant’s favor, the officer’s statement does not reasonably support an inference that he had prior awareness of any defective brakes; indeed, he clarified that he meant only that his brakes did not stop him, not that they were defective. The court of appeals’ sua sponte supposition to the contrary was inaccurate speculation that conflicted with the parties’ positions. We reverse and render judgment dismissing the case. I Early on a Saturday evening, Houston Police Department Officers Richard Corral and C. Goodman were assisting the Vice Division in running a sting operation with an undercover female detective posing as a sex worker. After an individual solicited the detective from his vehicle and paid $40 to engage in sexual activity at a nearby parking lot, Corral and Goodman drove to the lot to make an arrest. But when the suspect saw them, he fled in his red Mercedes “at a high rate of speed.” The officers pursued the suspect, activating their emergency lights and siren. While Corral focused on driving, Goodman called in the pursuit and the Mercedes’s license-plate number. Approximately three minutes into the chase, dispatch relayed that the Mercedes had been reported stolen. The pursuit lasted less than ten minutes with the suspect driving “erratically”; “at a high rate of speed, weaving in-and-out of traffic”; and “in an exceedingly dangerous manner,” including “driving the wrong direction” down a service road at one point. Corral tried to stay close enough to keep eyes on the unidentified suspect while maintaining enough distance to avoid a collision. As the suspect traveled north on a one-way, three-lane service road, Corral followed around fifty feet behind in the middle lane. Suddenly, the suspect turned right onto a side street, “barely missing” Ruben Rodriguez and Frederick Okon, who were in a pickup truck waiting at the stop sign to turn north onto the service road. As Corral followed in pursuit, he noticed the truck and attempted to avoid it but “hit the curb due to the brakes not working,” “lost control of the vehicle,” and “struck the bed of the truck.” At the time of the crash, Corral was traveling thirty-five to forty miles per hour. The investigating officer found that Corral caused the accident by making an improper wide turn from the middle lane. The police never apprehended the suspect but subsequently recovered the stolen vehicle. Rodriguez and Okon sued the City of Houston, alleging that Corral’s negligent driving caused them personal injuries for which the Tort Claims Act waives governmental immunity from suit.[3] In response, the City asserted its immunity in a traditional motion for summary judgment supported with affidavits from Corral and his supervisor, Sergeant Kenny Li, Jr. The motion raised two grounds: (1) the Tort Claims Act waives immunity only when the employee would be personally liable, and official immunity shields Corral from liability because he was acting in good faith; and (2) the Act’s emergency exception to the waiver applies because Corral was not acting recklessly in responding to an emergency.[4] In response, the plaintiffs attempted to raise a fact issue that Corral recklessly made an improper wide turn by attaching deposition excerpts from Corral and the investigating officer, the police department’s crash and offense reports, and related accident documents and photos. The trial court denied the motion, and the City appealed.[5] A divided court of appeals affirmed.[6] The court held that fact questions prevented summary judgment—specifically, whether and when Corral knew that his brakes were not functioning properly.[7] The court found evidence creating a fact issue in Corral’s statement that he “hit the curb due to the brakes not working” and his corresponding failure to discuss any prior awareness of the brakes’ condition.[8] According to the majority, if Corral had been driving with knowledge that his brakes were deficient, his course of action would have been reckless and not in good faith.[9] The dissent accused the majority of “imagin[ing] the existence of a fact” based on this “single statement” and resting its opinion “not on reasonable inferences but on rank speculation.”[10] In the dissent’s view, the record provides no suggestion of any prior awareness that the brakes malfunctioned.[11] Rather, given Corral’s description of accelerating and slowing the patrol car in pursuit, “[t]he only reasonable inference on that score is the opposite: that the brakes were functional.”[12] The City petitioned for review, which we granted. Because the issue of official immunity is dispositive, we do not reach the City’s emergency-exception issue.[13] II A A city performing governmental functions may not be sued unless the Legislature waived the city’s governmental immunity.[14] By enacting the Tort Claims Act, the Legislature determined that a city’s immunity is waived in a suit for personal injuries proximately caused by an employee’s negligence in the course and scope of employment and arising from the operation or use of a motor vehicle but only if “the employee would be personally liable” under Texas law.[15] And “[t]o the extent an employee has individual immunity from a tort claim for damages,” the Act provides that it is not affected by this waiver.[16] One type of “individual immunity” that shields government employees from personal liability is the common-law affirmative defense of official immunity.[17] “[P]erhaps most vital in police work,” official immunity protects officers “when they are performing (1) discretionary duties, (2) in good faith, and (3) within the scope of their authority.”[18] The doctrine promotes the public good by encouraging energetic law enforcement and allowing officers to make good-faith, split-second judgments based on their experience and training without fear of liability for every mistake.[19] Although official immunity is the employee’s affirmative defense, not the governmental employer’s,[20] the Legislature expressly chose language making the Act’s waiver of the employer’s immunity from suit contingent on the fact that “the employee would be personally liable.”[21] As we have consistently recognized, this means that the governmental employer’s immunity is not waived if its employee is protected by official immunity.[22] Thus, in a suit against the governmental employer, governmental immunity and official immunity may be essentially entwined.[23] But unlike governmental immunity, official immunity is an affirmative defense that must be pleaded and proved to shield an employee from personal liability; otherwise, the defense is lost.[24] As a result, a plaintiff could meet its “burden of affirmatively showing waiver of [governmental] immunity” under the Act,[25] including that the employee would be personally liable, without affirmatively negating official immunity. For that reason, we conclude that a governmental employer bears the burden to assert and prove its employee’s official immunity, in a manner analogous to an affirmative defense, to preclude enforcement of the Act’s waiver of governmental immunity on that ground.[26] The City raised its governmental immunity via a traditional summary-judgment motion, attaching evidence to conclusively establish Corral’s official immunity and to affirmatively negate his personal liability under Texas law.[27] In this appeal, only the good-faith element of the official-immunity defense is at issue.[28] Our review is de novo, and we view the evidence in the light most favorable to the nonmovants by indulging every reasonable inference and resolving any doubts in their favor.[29] But we do not disregard necessary contextual evidence or “evidence and inferences unfavorable to the [nonmovants] if reasonable jurors could not.”[30] B The foundation of the court of appeals’ analysis is the statement in Corral’s affidavit that he “hit the curb due to the brakes not working.” From this, the court inferred that a fact question exists about Corral’s awareness of the brakes’ defective nature prior to this event and if the evidence so proved, Corral would not be acting in good faith.[31] The City does not dispute that if this inference were reasonable, summary judgment would be improper. Absent this inference, however, the court’s analytical edifice crumbles. The reasonableness of the inference turns on the reasonably inferable meaning of Corral’s statement. Although “not working” may mean defective or not functioning,[32] the term may also signify that something is insufficient or not up to the task to accomplish an intended result.[33] The record establishes that Corral intended the latter meaning: the brakes were functional, but their use did not accomplish his intended result of stopping the car before it hit the curb. As an initial observation, the plaintiffs neither pleaded nor alleged that the brakes were defective. And in Corral’s deposition, the plaintiffs sought to clarify the meaning of his statement that his brakes were not working: [Plaintiffs' Counsel]: Okay. Were your brakes working at that point [of making the turn]? [Corral]: I would say not—I mean, I tried to brake as hard as I could. [Plaintiffs' Counsel]: Okay. Well, I mean, clearly the brakes didn’t stop you, but were they working? [Corral]: Yes. Corral also confirmed this understanding in the Houston Police Department Crash Questionnaire by marking “no” to the question “did faulty equipment cause the crash?”[34] The plaintiffs attached both pieces of evidence to their summary-judgment response, and they never argued in the lower courts that the brakes were defective—in fact, they never even mentioned the brakes. And in this Court, the plaintiffs expressly acknowledged that “[t]here is no indication that the brakes on Officer Corral’s cruiser were not working.” The court of appeals nevertheless injected uncertainty into what was undisputed, relying on a sua sponte construction of Corral’s statement as meaning that the brakes were defective.[35] The statement’s textual context, which we have repeatedly emphasized is “a primary determinant of meaning,”[36] also reinforces Corral’s intended meaning. In his affidavit, Corral made the statement after describing how he turned, accelerated, and decelerated his patrol car while pursuing the suspect in a high-speed chase without mentioning any operational trouble or defective brakes. We agree with the dissent in the court of appeals that considering the affidavit in its entirety—along with the undisputed summary-judgment evidence—the “only reasonable inference” is “that the brakes were functional.”[37] Finally, even if Corral had intended to communicate that he hit the curb because his brakes were defective, as the court of appeals concluded,[38] that statement alone would not give rise to a reasonable inference that he was aware of any defect before that point. Stating that a defect caused an event says nothing about one’s prior awareness. Inferring prior awareness is no more plausible than inferring no prior awareness—either inference would be a pure guess, which is no evidence to raise a fact question about the officer’s prior awareness.[39] In sum, the court of appeals erroneously inferred an issue of material fact to preclude summary judgment when the parties did not dispute the underlying fact and the evidence did not reasonably give rise to that inference. C We now turn to whether the City met its burden as the traditional summary-judgment movant. We conclude that the City conclusively established Corral’s good faith in making a wide turn while pursuing a suspect fleeing in a stolen vehicle and that the plaintiffs failed to raise a fact issue controverting the City’s proof. The standard for an officer’s good faith in a high-speed pursuit case is whether “a reasonably prudent officer, under the same or similar circumstances, could have believed that the need to immediately apprehend the suspect outweighed a clear risk of harm to the public in continuing the pursuit.”[40] No magic words are required to satisfy this holistic inquiry; rather, the summary-judgment proof must sufficiently assess particularized need–risk factors with reference to specific facts.[41] The focus is “on the objective facts and information the officer knew and perceived, not on whether the officer had subjectively considered and assessed certain factors.”[42] The “need” aspect of this balancing test refers to the urgency of police intervention, which is balanced against the “risk” aspect of the countervailing public-safety concerns.[43] The “need” factors include the seriousness of the crime to which the officer is responding, the necessity of the officer’s immediate presence to prevent injury or loss of life or to apprehend a suspect, and the availability of any alternative courses of action to achieve a comparable result.[44] The “risk” factors address the nature, severity, and likelihood of any harm that the officer’s actions could cause and whether such risk would be clear to a reasonably prudent officer.[45] As we recently reiterated, this standard “does not place an onerous burden on law enforcement” because the touchstone is “what a reasonable officer could have believed” under the circumstances.[46] To establish good faith, the City relied on affidavits from Corral and his supervisor, which provide similar accounts of the relevant events.[47] In their affidavits, the officers opined that a reasonable officer, under the same or similar circumstances, could have believed that the need to pursue the suspect, who was recklessly fleeing in a stolen vehicle, outweighed the risks of making a wide turn in pursuit. And the
