Austin At Large: The Dog That Caught the Cop Car

My two favorite topics of late – mindless cop worship and brainless Republican rule – merged on Tuesday, as the state's top GOP leaders proposed harsh measures to punish Austin for cutting the police budget. Their scheme makes little sense and would do us no real harm, but it sure sounds like something that'll show us ­pinkos! (Remember, we're not really the target audience here. This is fan service for their base, a distraction from the 10,000 Texans who've died from COVID-19.)

Remember when criminal justice reform was pitched as a bipartisan issue, championed by both the Austin City Coun­cil and the Texas Public Policy Foundation? Yeah, that's not a thing anymore. Liber­tar­ians, fiscal conservatives, and committed Christians – people over whom the GOP claims political dominion – all have legitimate rationales to make common cause with justice advocates. Many have done so, not with the fervor on the left, but not just for show, either. Perhaps a post-MAGA GOP will again concern itself with the high costs and poor outcomes of the justice system.

For now, we're on the path we traveled a decade ago to reform health care, when the tools of technocracy became weapons of radical socialism once in the hands of a (Black) Democratic president. While a unanimous Council's willingness to reduce police spending is momentous, the framework it adopted to do so is not radical. In the proper light, it's rather conservative – right-sizing a tax-funded service to Austin's actual needs and means, and improving efficiency through reorganizations and even outsourcing. You know, like managed­-care Medicaid, or charter schools. What is Greg Abbott complaining about?

Left Lane for Passing Only

This is now a consensus position among the pragmatic progressives who run Austin. (Again, I say: unanimous Council.) There are many Austinites who think a 25-30% reduction in police spending over 12 months doesn't go nearly far enough. Laying off officers currently in uniform is not a deal-breaker for groups such as Grassroots Leadership or Communities of Color United, who say they want APD wholly abolished in five years.

It's easy to dismiss such positioning as solipsistic – look at those woolly-headed lefties who imagine a world without cops! More relevant to the moment is that it's undemocratic. Now, I don't believe the claims of our marvelously mature friends at Voices of Austin that four out of five residents fear for their safety in our streets. (As some of them surely know, there are ethical standards in the polling industry that dictate how survey results should be disclosed, which they still have not met.) But I do believe that Austinites have not yet voted for a future without police.

Electoral politics is not the only form of democracy, but it's specious to pretend elected officials are failing, or selling out, when they listen more to their voters than to nonvoters in the streets. Now that we know who's running for Council this Novem­ber (see p.10), the incumbents are facing stronger challenges from their right than from their left. Of the 10 districts, the ones that probably best reflect the median Austin voter (not the median Austin resident) are D7 and D10, and Council Members Leslie Pool and Alison Alter have both broken toward the front of the pack on police reform.

Of Maps and Compasses

We talk about left, right, and center as we try to orient ourselves within an unfamiliar political landscape, but we should not forget that politics is not symmetrical. The coalitions on the left and right are not mirror images of one another; voters are not ideologically distributed in a nice bell curve, with the majority "in the middle." On criminal justice reform, the Council, the abolitionists, and the Republicans (and VoA Democrats) all claim the popular mandate. Depending on the circumstances, geographies, and levels of government, they could all be correct.

It's no accident that Team Red had to go to Clown Town, er, Cowtown to make an announcement they could have made here, and surround themselves with popular elected officials in no danger of losing their seats rather than the many vulnerable Texas House members in the Metro­plex. This august crowd nodded dutifully as Abbott the Big Red Dog made noises about freezing property tax revenue for cities who defund the police. (We'll likely see multiple bills filed for next session that each define "defunding" differently.)

People like Sen. Jane Nelson, chair of Senate Finance, and Ft. Worth Mayor Betsy Price, the former county tax assessor, all know such a plan would never pass the current Legislature, let alone one with a purple or blue House. (Democrats already chair the criminal justice committees in both chambers.) They also know the Texas constitution forbids a statewide property tax. And they know that even if it did pass, progressive blue-city voters could end up with lower taxes than their neighbors.

It's all more woolly-headed than the actual proposals for de-policing from Austin's left, let alone what Council actually did. After years of crying "socialist!" and abandoning the fealty to reason that used to be its brand, the GOP is now losing to actual socialists and has made reason a Democratic value. They, and not the reformers, have become the dogs that caught the cop car.