Shift funds to oversight and mental health
The current protests across the nation and our city — in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor — are just the latest signs of this nation’s crisis in policing. And it is a crisis that we are all too familiar with in Houston. I proposed several first steps Houston City Council can take to support our community, increase transparency and make us all safer.
Council has the unique power to reimagine public safety solutions that will protect all members of our community. To that end, I urged them to eliminate 199 vacant civilian positions on the police force and to reallocate $11.7 million from a $964 million police budget to fund a police oversight board and fund emergency first responders who are specially trained in mental health.
Funding the independent police oversight board is critical in this moment to promote police accountability, community trust and public safety. This board would provide the authority to conduct its own misconduct investigations rather than reviewing ones performed by the Houston Police Department. It also called for $1 million toward an online complaint portal and $3 million for enhanced de-escalation training.
But prior to the vote on Wednesday, Mayor Sylvester Turner stated that he did not support my amendment, and the amendment did not gain enough support to pass.
I also asked that the council fund emergency first responders who have specialized training in mental health issues to respond to nonviolent emergencies. In the best of times, local communities struggle to meet the health needs of highly vulnerable people, including those who struggle with mental health or substance use disorder, poverty, housing insecurity or otherwise lack access to traditional health care resources.
Because most communities do not have the kind of services necessary to assist someone experiencing a crisis borne of behavioral health issues, homelessness or poverty, law enforcement by default has served as the first responder. But police officers are not drug counselors, social workers or health care professionals and their involvement all too often leads to the unnecessary arrest and incarceration of these individuals and fails to address public safety concerns exacerbated by the lack of housing, health care or substance use treatment.
I suggested Houston’s first responder program be modeled after a program in Eugene, Ore., called the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) program. This is a mobile crisis intervention team that responds to calls related to behavioral health. Teams consist of a medic and a crisis worker and provide “immediate stabilization in case of urgent medical need or psychological crisis, assessment, information, referral, advocacy and (in some cases) transportation to the next step in treatment.”
Mayor Turner expressed his support for the idea but stated this was a policy discussion and not appropriate for the budgetary process. He invited other council members to offer comment but made it clear the amendment was either going to committee or would be voted out of order. Council Member Abbie Kamin expressed her strong support for the program and offered to partner with me. Other council members also expressed their support but ultimately all agreed with the mayor that the program should be sent to committee for further exploration.
I tried my best to get the voices of the people who elected me, the voices of the people who are demanding reform, the voices of my sons, heard. While my amendments did not pass, I along with the public, will be ensuring the process is accountable to the public. We serve the people, and that's who we are all accountable to.
We must do much more and that includes evaluating and implementing solutions like violence interruption programs. Reducing violent crime, particularly gun violence, in Houston is not going to be achieved by overreliance on the police but, instead, by implementing bold and creative solutions that will prevent violence before it occurs.
I have been studying the violence interruption model of violence prevention. This is a public health approach to violence prevention that stops lethal violence before it occurs and stops its spread by interrupting ongoing conflicts, working to change behavior related to violence and changing community norms. Violence interruption is based on proven public health techniques and is designed to change the entire community outcome by reducing shootings and killings. It is not only a more compassionate way to prevent violence in our communities than policing, but it is also more effective. This model has been evaluated many times and has consistently shown significant reductions in violence in a number of cities.
The world is watching. The mayor and city council should enact real change by committing to the long and hard but important work of looking at other ways to reform policing in Houston. There is much, much more we can do and must do to build our city into a place where all of us feel safe.