Inflating the police budget is not reimagining public safety.
If you tuned in to the City Manager’s presentation of his proposed ATX budget, you probably heard the city claims to still be on the path to Reimagine Public Safety despite the TX legislation’s hurdles. Let’s examine this.
(Check out our Twitter thread for the tl;dr:)
After last summer’s uprisings over the police shooting of George Floyd and locally Mike Ramos, City Council voted to reallocate 5% of APD funding to community alternatives. This involved delaying a cadet class in order to overhaul the training and reducing officer overtime, but not a single officer was fired.
Austin City Council placed more substantial chunks of money into a “Decouple” fund — intended to move funds out of APD and under other city departments better equipped to take on those functions, and a “Reimagine” fund — intended to investigate community alternatives for these functions.
The Reimagine Public Safety Task Force was convened to inform a plan for how to shift these resources. Community members spent hundreds of hours and brought in community members from over-policed communities who overwhelmingly told stories of harm and trauma by the policing and incarceration systems, and wanted economic and health reinvestment in overpoliced communities and community-led violence prevention alternatives.
The RPS Task Force created recommendations that included investing in a robust array of community initiatives, to be funded by getting rid of harmful, discriminatory, and invasive divisions of APD, cutting funding for surveillance and the drug war, and curbing over-policing.
Texas Republicans retaliated with HB1900, which says that a city’s police funding must be equal to or exceed its 2019 funding levels. If a city ever increases its police budget, or its police department’s percentage of the budget, it can never be decreased. The bill created an array of financial penalties for any city that chooses not to comply which cut off its ability to raise revenue to fund needed programs.
But the City Manager’s proposed budget not only puts the entire Reimagine & Decouple fund back into APD to comply with this bill — it INCREASES funding to APD by $10.5 Million. It gives $442.8 Million to APD and only $1.9Million to the recommendations of the RPS task force.
Keep in mind, before this year’s budget process even began and before the passage of HB1900, City Council already voted to fund a new cadet class despite opposition from the RPS task force, giving millions to APD that could have been used for the community alternatives proposed.
Let’s be clear: inflating the police budget goes against everything that the RPS task force worked for. Reimagining public safety means acknowledging that police were never designed to protect BIPOC communities, that they continue to exercise control through coercion and violence, and that police do not prevent violence. None of this has changed since last year, and APD continues to exact the same harm against BIPOC community members.
The city is digging in its heels to this violent status quo instead of funding the community initiatives proposed by the task force. We need $30 Million this fiscal year for neighborhood hubs, a universal basic income pilot, community health workers, immigrant legal defense, and an equity assessment of city procurement, grants, and council agenda items related to public safety.
There are plenty of areas of the APD budget identified by the RPS task force that actively do harm and should be defunded. In fact, these totaled over $60 Million. There is NO excuse not to choose a few of these to reallocate that equal $10.5 Million. [link to patrol & surveillance report]
To name a just few things that were flagged as harmful in the Reimagine Public Safety process and are still funded in this year’s APD Budget:
$2 Million on Austin Regional Intelligence Center (ARIC), is Austin’s “Big Brother.” It conducts invasive surveillance on Austin residents through a web of high-tech surveillance and data-sharing contracts and shares the data with over 20 local law enforcement agencies, as well as federal agencies such as ICE and DHS. This places BIPOC residents at increased risk of criminalization, arrest, and deportation.
We spend another $2.4 Million on constant video surveillance, mostly located in Black and Brown neighborhoods, through the Real Time Crime Center / HALO street cameras.
Remember when APD severely injured dozens of Austinites protesting for Black lives with a volley of rubber bullets and tear gas? Despite heart-wrenching testimony and resounding condemnations from council, a couple of months later they had re-stocked to the tune of $66,000 and “crowd management,” typically a $216,000 line item, is still in their budget.
APD spends $2.2 Million on a Gang Suppression unit that inputs heavily over-represented proportions of Black and Brown people into the Texas Gang Database, which mirrors the extreme racial disparities and criminalization of minors that other cities such as Chicago have found from gang databases.
APD spends nearly $3 Million on two K-9 units. These units are particularly expensive to maintain, and police dogs have been historically weaponized against people of color and have been shown to exacerbate use of force and unconscious bias.
Reimagining public safety demands a shift in resources. It’s the recognition that funneling more money into police does harm and works against everything that community alternatives we do fund attempt to accomplish.
Arrests have all sorts of destabilizing impacts on families and communities: job loss, mental health issues, family separation, incarceration, immigrant detention and deportation.
Community alternatives such as neighborhood hubs, universal basic income, community health workers, and immigrant legal defense, on the other hand, have a stabilizing impact of dependable income, access to stable housing, connection to physical, mental and behavioral health treatment, building community relationships, and keeping families together.
This keeps us safer than anything policing can ever claim to offer our communities.
Any council member who supports Reimagining Public Safety must oppose the additional $10.5 Million to APD. A vote to permanently inflate the police budget OVER the $120 Million the city is already giving back to comply with HB1900 is a vote to continue to deprive BIPOC communities of the resources and alternatives that can actually prevent violence.