Police cuts draw swift partisan backlash
One wonders, sometimes, what the Republican leaders of Texas are thinking — or, indeed, whether “thinking” is a verb that can be accurately applied to their activities.
Tuesday was one of those days. Last week, the left-leaning Austin City Council voted to cut its police department budget by one-third over the next year and shift the funding to other services. The move was denounced by Republicans including Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and state Sen. Jane Nelson, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee. They think the Texas Legislature should take action to protect police funding, when the next regular session begins in January.
On Tuesday, the trio — along with Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, Fort Worth Mayor Betsy
Price and several Republican lawmakers — held a press conference to propose that any city that “defunds” the police will have its property tax revenues frozen indefinitely.
“This will be an effective tool that effectively will prevent cities from being able to reduce funding support for law enforcement agencies,” said Abbott.
In a follow-up tweet, the governor took credit.
“Under my plan any city that defunds police will have their property tax revenue capped at current levels,” Abbott said. “Cities can’t cut law enforcement & then turn around and increase taxes on the residents they just endangered.”
There’s a superficial political logic to this proposal. The nationwide protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody have drawn attention to the need for law enforcement reform — and polls have found that a majority of Americans back the idea. The same polls have found, however, that a majority of Americans are skeptical of calls to “defund the police,” even though advocates argue that reallocating some resources in a judicious way would improve public safety.
In light of those results, the Austin City Council arguably handed the Texas GOP a gift when it voted to slash the police budget — especially at a moment when state Republican leaders such as Abbott have been roundly criticized for their mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has now claimed more than 10,000 lives across the state.
Indeed, Texas Democrats were quick to blast the Big Three’s press conference as an effort to change the subject.
“Greg Abbott’s distraction doesn’t take away from
his mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis,” said Abhi Rahman, the Texas Democratic Party’s communications director. “Because of (President Donald Trump) and Abbott’s failures, 500,000 Texans have contracted the virus and more than 10,000 Texans are dead. It never had to be this way.”
But the proposal that Republican leaders put forward doesn’t exactly hold up to scrutiny.
“Whaaat?” asked Charles Blain, the director of Urban Reform, who has previously called on his fellow conservatives to take calls for police reform seriously.
“Is there a definition of ‘defund?’” he continued. “Are cities not able to reduce PD budgets at all, even if warranted?”
Those are good questions, and Texans were quick to raise others — some of which are impossible to answer before the legislation that Abbott called for is actually drafted.
The Austin City Council’s action would delay three cadet classes and eliminate about 150 open jobs in what Police Chief Brian Manley described as the most dramatic changes he had seen in 30 years. “This is not good for us as an agency, it is not good for those cadets and their families, and it is not good for the reputation of the Austin Police Department in the recruiting circles,” Manley said.
Funds would instead be used for the response to the coronavirus, mental health, violence prevention and victim services, among other needs. The city would earmark $49 million for a Reimagine Safety Fund, aimed at providing alternatives to traditional policing.
As dramatic as these changes are, the Austin City Council had the right to make them — and voters who disapprove are free to weigh in at the ballot box.
And the state leaders who put forward their proposal Tuesday are ignoring the possibility that cuts to police department budgets may be warranted in some cities for reasons that have nothing to do with politics or ideology. If the leaders of a major city are looking to trim overall spending — as Republicans routinely exhort them to do — it’s unlikely that law enforcement would emerge unscathed, if only because it accounts for a large share of municipal spending. The $5.1 billion budget that the Houston City Council passed in June for fiscal year 2021 includes nearly $1 billion for the police department. (In fact, the council in June added $20 million to the police budget, with Mayor Sylvester Turner explaining that he had heard calls from throughout the community to invest in law enforcement.)
Beyond that, though, the Big Three’s proposal amounts to an aggressive preemptive strike against the principle of local control, which Texas Republicans defended, often quite vigorously, when they wielded more power in the state’s major cities.
“I would want to see the actual legislation before I comment directly on Governor Abbott's proposal because 'defunding' means different things to different people,” said Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson in a statement. “But generally, I believe it should be up to voters to hold their local elected officials accountable for their budgetary decisions, which should reflect the people's priorities.”
The plan put forward Tuesday may have been intended as nothing more than a distraction during the week of the Democratic National Convention, where police reform has been stressed. It nonetheless reveals that Texas state leaders, who undercut local leaders trying to control the spread of the new coronavirus, seem to back local control only when it aligns with their political ideology.