San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Charter campaign could motivate area voters
San Antonio is about to get a lesson in the finer distinctions between policies and laws.
That lesson will come in the form of a campaign by a coalition of more than a dozen progressive organizations — including Act 4 SA, Ground Game Texas, SA Stands and the Texas Organizing Project — that want to amend the City Charter.
The Justice Charter Coalition submitted petitions with more than 37,000 signatures to the city clerk on Tuesday for its proposed ballot initiative. If at least 20,000 of those signatures are deemed to be valid, San Antonio voters will find the justice-charter proposition on their municipal ballots in May.
All of the changes called for in the proposition already are being practiced in San Antonio.
The coalition wants to ban police chokeholds and noknock police warrants. Police Chief William McManus has banned both practices in the San Antonio Police Department.
The coalition wants to eliminate arrests and citations for possession of small amounts of marijuana. For nonviolent crimes, it wants authorities to lean toward issuing citations rather than making arrests.
Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales has partnered with SAPD for the past 3 ½ years on a cite-and-release program for nonviolent offenses, including the possession of misdemeanor amounts of marijuana.
The coalition also wants to decriminalize abortion. Gonzales announced last summer — in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe V. Wade and triggered this state’s abortion ban — that he did not plan to prosecute abortion cases in Bexar County.
Since the goals of the Justice Charter Coalition already have been accomplished, it’s natural to ask why the group decided to go forward with the ballotproposition push.
The answer is that policies are temporary. They are the product of discretionary decisions by people in leadership positions.
The coalition wants to codify these policies, so they won’t be subject to the whims of changing personnel or shifting political trends.
That’s where things get a bit dicey, particularly with the abortion and marijuana provisions.
Gonzales has walked a fine line on abortion, fully aware that he can’t explicitly refuse to enforce the state’s ban.
While he indicated that he didn’t believe justice would be served by prosecuting abortion cases, Gonzales stopped short of promising that he would never prosecute abortion providers.
“Absent aggravating circumstances, my plan is to review each case and make that decision on a case-by-case basis,” Gonzales said.
That’s taking prosecutorial discretion right to the edge of what’s permissible. Codifying that kind of policy with a charter amendment would almost certainly invite legal challenges.
Ananda Tomas, the founder and executive director of Act 4
SA, said the coalition’s petition drive was born out of frustration with activists’ inability to get City Council to act on a cite-and-release ordinance.
“We thought, ‘Why don’t we take it to the people for a vote?’ If (council members) aren’t going to even consider it, this is another way to legislate ourselves,” Tomas said.
San Antonio City Attorney Andy Segovia told me he considers both the abortion and marijuana provisions of the proposed charter amendment to be in violation of state law.
“The state is the one who is in control of our criminal laws,” Segovia said. “There’s other municipalities who’ve had the same thing, and those municipalities don’t enforce it, because they can’t.”
Last November, five Texas cities (San Marcos, Denton,
Killeen, Harker Heights and Elgin) approved propositions banning arrests and citations for carrying small amounts of marijuana. Last May, Austin passed a similar measure, Proposition A, which also banned no-knock warrants.
The Harker Heights City Council repealed the new ordinance two weeks after the November election, on the grounds that it was nullified by state law.
Segovia predicted that if the Justice Charter proposition makes it to the ballot and wins approval from San Antonio voters, the city “just won’t enforce it.”
Regardless of the electoral or legal consequences, however, there will be at least one undeniable effect of the Justice Charter campaign. It will energize progressives seeking
reforms in our law enforcement and criminal justice systems.
A 2021 campaign to strip collective-bargaining power from the San Antonio Police Officers Association fell just short of victory, but it spurred more than 150,000 voters to go to the polls. (By comparison, the 2019 municipal election barely drew 100,000 voters.) Tomas said two-thirds of the petition signers were 45 or younger.
“They were really excited and quick to sign,” she said. “I think we will see an increase in young voters in municipal elections because of this, which we’ve needed for decades now.”
No one can dispute that.