$150M in APD Budget "Cuts" Didn't "Just Happen"

Here's some important context for how we got to where we are now, with the relatively modest structural and financial reforms to the Austin Police Department.

"MODEST!?" you say? Yes. Moving services outside of police control that studies show increases the public safety isn't "radical." 

As for the money, only a small portion ($21M) was "cut" for positions that were never going to be filled, and the suspension of the upcoming cadet classes (no more until training policies are seriously reformed). But the rest - "decoupling" and "reimagine safety" - is moving stuff out from under APD. 

So take that $21M out of the "$150M" being used as the general "cut" number, leaving $129M to be re-routed from a proposed $440M budget - which isn't that huge when you consider APD's budget was $250M in 2010; and $167M in 2000. This is a 150% increase in just 20 years, when our population increased 50% AND crime was decreasing! We pumped EVERYTHING into APD at the expense of Fire and EMS (who haven't even kept up with population growth), social services, parks, libraries and much more. 

So, despite a WHOLE lot of hype and misinformation, and push polls, we are merely implementing a first pass at righting our faulty, expensive, and unsustainable course on public safety. 

✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊✊

Kathy Mitchell laid out the rest of what I was wanting to write, but did so way better than I could have:

(from Kathy, Aug. 21, 2020):

"I realized today, during FB exchanges about the police budget with some very smart folks who have not been intimately involved in public safety, that people are concerned with what they perceive to be the suddenness of all this.

And I totally understand. If you have not been involved in public safety debates, then it may well look like George Floyd was killed in Minnesota, people in Austin suddenly leapt from their homes and families into the streets, and then Austin City Council cut the police budget $150 million.

Face slap.

That's not what happened at all. Or maybe, its like 5% of the story.

This budget vote happened because most of these ideas have been in the works for years, or are changes now primed because we tried everything else and everything else failed.

I will start this story with the deaths of Brick Monroe and David Joseph, both mentally ill people shot by police many years ago now. I could start it far earlier, with the death of Sophia King. So many things have been tried over so many years!

But I want to speak to the present moment. These were the early days of Black Lives Matter, when the Austin Justice Coalition first emerged. There was a new generation of activists, smart, energized, empowered. I thought this time we would really address the systemic racism because a wonderful spirit animates this younger generation.

Community groups (new and old) sat down with APD, ready to negotiate incremental reforms. The city passed "Freedom Cities" -- to help reduce force incidents by reducing the situations that might cause people to resist. AJC proposed lethal force reforms and won some changes to the General Orders, most prominently a de-escalation requirement. But people of color continued to be killed. APD stopped posting its force incident dataset. It was hard to see the de-escalation.

We figured out that police could not be held accountable under our old system of civilian oversight, so we organized and fought for accountability in the police contract. City Council ultimately voted against a bad police contract and civil rights advocates made sure the next one had accountability reforms. Despite greater transparency and a much stronger oversight office, people of color continued to be killed.

Crime victims came forward to talk about the failures of the sex crime unit, then willingly joined a multi-year conversation that brought little change. DPS, called in to run the DNA lab after mismanagement became a dumpster fire, threw in the towel and the city closed the lab altogether. Community groups called for an independent crime lab like the one Houston now enjoys.

Harm reduction advocates proposed alternative approaches for people using drugs. Someone even tried to give the Department a shipment of Narcan to help officers save lives. The Chief sent back the Narcan, announced that police would continue to arrest for marijuana, and people of color continued to be killed.

Civil rights leaders supported the creation of bias training at the Academy and new classes were added. But cadets dropping out reported a toxic and violent culture. The City required APD to assess the Academy, and sent in community auditors. APD stonewalled the community members. The assessments, sitting on Manley's desk when George Floyd was killed, only came out because the primary author released them after taking another job somewhere else. They paint a picture of an Academy in need of a major overhaul.

Thanks to the anonymous complaints that could now be filed with the new Police Oversight office (thanks to the new police contract), we did start to know more and more about the depth of the systemic racism at the police department. The "Newsome" scandal lead to the Tatum report. The Office of Police Oversight reanalyzed the last three years of racial profiling data and found racial profiling.

But it seemed that no reports or reforms had altered the racism or an intractably violent culture of policing at all. Calls to stop funding more police and start funding other approaches to social problems started to gain steam two budget cycles ago. Last budget cycle we took some modest steps forward. Community groups had called for, and the city funded, an alternative first response for the mentally ill. But almost no one got a non-police response after the new system was implemented.

And then Mike Ramos was brutally murdered by several police officers in front of a host of frightened witnesses who filmed it on their phones. It turned out that one of those officers had killed a suicidal university professor less than a year prior and was back on the street. Groups working in every corner of public safety reform came together in protest and in horror at the culture of policing on display. Where was the required de-escalation? How was this man threatening the officers? The horror was magnified by the feeling that somehow all the cooperation and negotiation and acceptance of half measures was part of the problem.

THEN George Floyd was brutally murdered by police in a city far away, in front of witnesses, with video. The nation erupted. And Austin's police responded with displays of violence against protesters that shocked the conscience of the city. In almost no time at all, the work already done by so many turned into proposals for budget cuts, inter-departmental migrations, and a vision for a very different public safety system less reliant on heavily armed men with "command and control" training and more reliant on a range of other skillsets.

This is not the whole story, because that would be a book, but you get the idea. This was not sudden. It was not crazy. The groups who have been in the trenches doing this work for years backed it, the police union and GACC* fought it as expected. The items that ended up in the final budget amendment were reasonable. Most of the actual cuts to the Police Department were the result of halting the police academy in order to fix it. No officers were laid off in the making of this budget. Everyone who voted for it on Council did so because they know the history and have seen the incrementalisms fail. And even so, community groups agreed to a year long implementation process with quarterly milestones to give all the details due consideration.

I hope this bit of history helps you, my friends, explain how this quick action was not quick at all, and maybe that it was grounded in the reasonable ideas of reasonable people. If you think it helpful please share."

*Greater Austin Crime Commission (not a city commission, but an advocacy group)