San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
On Proposition B, the police union won the battle but is losing the war
Oji Martin, co-founder of Fix SAPD, could barely contain herself. She grinned. On the wall-sized screen in a corner of KSAT’s newsroom, her face beamed.
It wasn’t quite 7:30 p.m. on election day, May 1. The early balloting results showed that 49 percent of voters supported Proposition B, which would strip the San Antonio police union of its collective bargaining rights.
So Martin’s side was losing. Yet San Antonio voters had shown up in force, and that in itself was a victory, she told KSAT.
It wasn’t empty campaign talk, something you tell supporters to prepare them for a long night, to keep them energized and hopeful. Prop B touched an exposed nerve in the city. With Mayor
Ron Nirenberg’s re-election all but certain and few truly hot City Council races, Prop B drove the biggest turnout of voters for a May election in years.
Appearing on the same wallsized screen within minutes of Martin, Danny Diaz, president of the San Antonio Police Officers Association, was somber and uncertain. He sat alone in a dimly lit office, a sharp contrast to the party atmosphere at the Friendly Spot Ice House on
South Alamo Street where Martin was anchored.
Just a few months after replac
ing political street fighter Mike Helle as union head, Diaz told viewers, “I was playing catch-up from the get-go.”
His union was winning at that moment.
Union’s soft power
And as we know, the lead held throughout the night and Prop B failed.
But what a lousy victory for the union.
The heart of the union’s campaign was the lie that Prop B would “defund the police.” What it actually would have done, of
course, was take away law enforcement officers’ ability to haggle over pay, benefits and disciplinary procedures for bad cops.
Like a lot of other police unions, SAPOA historically has excelled at smudging the fact that it’s an arm of organized labor, with a laser focus on its members’ economic interests. It wants San Antonians to think of it simply as the city’s police force, the ones who keep us safe. If you accept that, it’s a short step to the conclusion that any measure that cuts against its
members’ interests is an attack on law enforcement.
The union’s success in cultivating that image is one of the main reasons it’s had such a firm grip on San Antonio mayors and City Council members over the years. That’s its soft power. Its hard power is the threat that it’ll run challengers against uncooperative incumbents and mobilize its members and troves of voter data on their behalf.
Former City Manager Sheryl Sculley offered a glimpse of how it works in her memoir “Greedy Bastards: One City’s Texas-size
Struggle To Avoid a Financial Crisis.”
‘We’ll talk about it later’
Sculley was city manager from 2005 to 2019. Early on, she and her lieutenants concluded that cops’ and firefighters’ compensation packages and side benefits eventually would crowd out spending on basic services such as libraries, parks, street repairs, etc. (Important to note: The obstacles to firing law-breaking police officers were nearly an afterthought at the time.)
Shortly after Julián Castro’s 2009 election as mayor, Sculley saw an opening. She asked him to consider “changing the city’s compensation model for public safety employees.” The fire and police unions’ labor contracts were up for renegotiation that year.
From her book:
“Are you asking me to take on the union that just supported me during my election?” Julián replied.
“Yes,” I confirmed. “If the timing isn’t right now, please give me a chance to make the business case to you for the next contract.”
Julián agreed. “Let me take care of some other things first, and we’ll talk about it later.”
Castro eventually convened a task force to study police and fire compensation. Little came of it during his tenure.
Twelve years later — and with a failed run for the Democratic presidential nomination behind him — Castro embraced Prop B and went door-knocking in support of it.
‘How could this happen?’
For many politicians, it’s easy
to side with the police union when the issue is officers’ pay and benefits, and not just because of SAPOA’s political heavyhandedness. In general, voters don’t think the people responsible for maintaining public safety should be nickel-and-dimed. That’s why Sculley enjoyed much more support among San Antonio’s chambers of commerce for a harder-edge approach to contract negotiations than she ever did on the City Council.
Bemoaning the threat posed by rich police and fire contracts to the city’s sacred triple-A bond rating turned out to be a lame rallying cry.
The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis a year ago wrecked that paradigm. It electrified people and drew them to the streets.
In an NPR interview last week, Oji Martin — a 34-year-old Northwest Side resident and owner of Backstory Backdrops, a creative
design firm for parties and other events — talked about her own political awakening a year ago.
“Like so many other Americans, sitting in my home, I was just watching the television screen wondering how could this happen and what can we do about it?” she said. “And it began with the kitchen table conversation with my brother that led to us doing more investigation on a Washington Post report that San Antonio was number one in the
nation for rehiring fired officers.”
She and other organizers of Fix SAPD want the city to be able to fire bad officers and keep them fired. That’s not justice, but it’s approaching justice.
Damaged despite victory
The surprisingly close fight over Prop B showed that nearly half the voters who showed up for the May 1 election were willing to rip out the union’s heart — its collective bargaining rights —
to secure that reform. Few of them were thinking about the prosaic issues of police compensation and benefits.
Despite its win, SAPOA comes out of this election damaged, its political standing in question.
Early election night, Danny Diaz must have known that in his bones. That might explain why he was so downbeat on the cusp of victory.