This is an excerpt from the Oct. 4 edition of the Austin Politics Newsletter. To get daily breaking news and analysis on city politics, click here to subscribe. 

Unlike most people who work in Republican and conservative politics, Michael Searle says that one of the main reasons he got involved in government work was his disgust with the criminal justice system.

“I read The New Jim Crow and The Rise of the Warrior Cop and they really had an impact on me,” he told me in an interview over the phone last week.

To that end, from 2013-14 he worked for Rep. David Simpson, a Republican with a strong libertarian streak from Longview. Searle wrote a white paper for Simpson recommending ending civil forfeiture, decriminalizing marijuana, barring no-knock warrants, requiring warrants for body cavity searches in traffic stops, requiring all SWAT raids to be filmed and establishing a statewide database for warrants issued. On some of those issues, he made progress, on others, not so much.

Later he worked for conservative Council Member Ellen Troxclair. Although Troxclair opposed the “fair chance hiring” ordinance that barred employers from including questions about criminal record on job applications, she voted with the rest of Council to oppose a proposed police contract because of the cost of the proposed pay increases. It was an issue of “fiscal responsibility,” Searle recalls.

Having seen the potential for bipartisanship on criminal justice reform, Searle has been disheartened by the polarization on the issue in the past year-and-a-half. There was a moment following George Floyd’s murder, he says, when he believed an opportunity for major change was possible.

Instead, the division only became worse. Locally, City Council rushed to embrace arbitrary cuts to the police budget supported by police abolitionists. The conservative backlash has been equally arbitrary: local Republicans are now pushing Prop A, which would commit the city to an enormous unfunded mandate to employ two officers for every 1,000 residents.

“It’s just not good public policy,” Searle says about Prop A. “In my view public policy should be outcome-driven…The metric should be murders (or other violent crime), not some arbitrary staffing level tied to population.”

Well, if murders are up, isn’t increasing the police force a logical response? Searle is unconvinced, saying the “jury is still out” on the relationship between police presence and violent crime.

He is not certain why murders have gone up around the country in the past two years, but notes that “violence tends to follow desperation,” of which there has been plenty throughout the pandemic.

Searle is wary of accepting city staff’s fiscal estimate of Prop A at face value, but says the increased police spending would force the city to raise taxes (more than usual) or make cuts elsewhere.

Searle, who three years ago led an unsuccessful campaign to require the city to undergo an efficiency audit, certainly believes the city could manage its money better. But it will be very hard for the city to fund the Prop A mandate without raising taxes more than usual or cutting into other core city services, he says.

“The city is spending money on liberal feel-good stuff but it’s at the margins,” he says. “The big chunks are police, fire, EMS and then parks.”

He asks: Are those who support enshrining a police staffing mandate in the city charter going to demand the same for the fire department? What about EMS?

Although Searle is opposed to Prop A, he is reluctant to take part in the No Way on Prop A campaign, which is leaning heavily on anti-Republican sentiment to defeat the initiative. (Whether or not it plays a role in his thinking, it is worth pointing out that those running the No Way campaign are his longtime political adversaries who have opposed his work on the efficiency audit, the Convention Center, Project Connect etc)

“When Trump was elected our brains broke,” he says. “We raised the volume on everything so high that we’ve completely lost the lexicon. Both sides are saying the other side are Nazis. The rhetoric around the opponents is so extreme. We’re demonizing each other. There are hundreds of these little fights happening all over the country and there is an aggregate and the aggregate is really dangerous.”

There are glimmers of hope for collaboration –– “Just recently you had Rand Paul in the Senate and AOC in the House file no-knock bills” –– but the dominant theme from both sides has been to use the issue for political gain but to make no meaningful policy changes.

“What has Joe Biden done on criminal justice since he was elected? Nothing.”

Searle says he knows a number of conservatives who are opposed to Prop A but they’re not going to say so publicly. Just as some City Council members likely went along with policies they didn’t support out of fear of being called a “racist Republican who doesn’t care about Black people getting shot,” conservatives fear being accused of betraying the blue.

“The way it’s framed is either you’re for defunding the police or for Prop A,” he says. “It’s not a binary thing.”

This is an excerpt from the Oct. 4 edition of the Austin Politics Newsletter. To get daily breaking news and analysis on city politics, click here to subscribe. 

This is an excerpt from the Sept. 2 edition of the Austin Politics Newsletter. To get daily breaking news and analysis on city politics, click here to subscribe. 

I-35 has long been decried as a physical and psychological barrier in Austin.

The psychological aspect comes from the fact that the highway for decades separated white Austin from black and brown Austin. When built in 1962, the highway largely replaced East Avenue, which the city had since 1928 enforced as an explicit racial boundary, west of which black and brown people were generally not welcomed. The new highway was a convenient excuse to reinforce the boundary just as the civil rights movement was starting to chip away at Jim Crow.

I-35 remained an important racial divider long after de jure segregation ended in the 60’s, but in the past decade its relevance in this regard has shrunk due to gentrification on the east side. Austin is still a profoundly segregated city, but I-35 is no longer the key dividing line.

What’s not really debatable is that I-35 very much remains a major physical barrier. Many east-west streets are halted by I-35, forcing drivers, pedestrians and cyclists wishing to cross to make an unpleasant, if not perilous, journey on the frontage road.

And it need not be. We can have a major road, or even a highway, that doesn’t turn a major part of downtown into a hellscape. Indeed, imagine if those scores of acres that are currently dedicated to concrete could instead be home to things that actually enhance downtown: businesses, entertainment, apartments, green space? What if all of that land actually generated billions of dollars in economic activity and property tax revenue? This is the possibility that the Reconnect proposal offers by burying the downtown portion of I-35 and building a good old fashioned urban boulevard on top, thus restoring the street grid and opening up numerous acres of land for development and green space.

TxDOT has no interest in such a solution, of course. Its proposed expansion of I-35 makes the highway even wider, making the physical barrier even more formidable.

Of course, that’s not how they describe it. If you hear TxDOT officials describe their two (very similar) proposed alternatives for expanding I-35, you may come away with the impression that their plan is all about connecting the east and west. This slide from the agency’s presentation to City Council on Tuesday, for instance, suggests that connectivity is a top priority:

More than 15 widened east-west crossings! Plus three new ones!

The fact is that what they’re proposing does not differ substantially from what exists now. They are not making a meaningful attempt to restore the city’s street grid.

In the graphic below, the red dots indicate street crossings under the highway and yellow dots indicate crossing above the highway. The top line is the status quo and the two bottom lines are TxDOT’s two proposed alternatives.

If you count all the dots, you’ll see there will only be one more all-use street crossing (at 5th St). There will still be long stretches of highway that cannot be crossed, particularly on the northern and southern ends. I-35 will continue to be a major east-west barrier to pedestrians, bicyclists, wheelchair users and, frankly, drivers.

This is an excerpt from the Sept. 2 edition of the Austin Politics Newsletter. To get daily breaking news and analysis on city politics, click here to subscribe. 

This is an excerpt from the Aug. 11 edition of the Austin Politics Newsletter. To get daily breaking news and analysis on city politics, click here to subscribe. 

Yesterday city budget officials released an estimate for what it will cost to pay for the police staffing mandate in the Save Austin Now proposition. It’s not pretty.

Remember, the SAN petition, which will be on the ballot in November, would require the city to employ two sworn police officers (civilian police employees don’t count) per 1,000 residents. It would also require the police department to maintain an average of 35% “community engagement” time for patrol officers. It would also require an additional 40 hours of annual in-house training and require the city to set up a program that offers additional financial incentives (of unspecified value) for officers who learn a second language, mentor cadets or who are awarded honorable conduct citations.

There is reason to believe that even if the referendum is approved, it will not be enforceable due to a provision of the city charter that forbids the use of referendums in “appropriating money or authorizing the levy of taxes.” But that’s a separate discussion…

The budget office’s analysis includes a low estimate and a high estimate, based on population growth and wage growth. Because obviously the cost of employing that many officers depends on how much we decide to pay them and how high we set the financial incentives. (Indeed, if this mandate is approved, I imagine the police union will have a much harder time negotiating pay increases)

The low estimate assumes over the next five years:

• 1% population growth
• 1% wage growth
• One new police substation for the increased patrol staff
• $50 increase in the existing monthly language stipend
• $175 per month mentorship stipend
• $500 stipend for honorable conduct citations
• Purchase or lease of new training facility
• 12 new training employees
• To meet the 35% community engagement time, APD moves officers out of specialized units and into patrol

It also assumes that in order to have 2 officers per 1,000k residents employed at all times, the city would actually have to budget for 2.3/1000k. Why? Simply budgeting for the minimum required number of police officers would leave the city vulnerable to falling below the level as officers retire.

Total cost : $54.3M a year or $271.5M over five years.

The high estimate assumes:

• 2% population growth
• 2% wage growth
• 3 new police substations
• $175 increase in language stipend
• $350/month membership stipend
• $1,000 stipend for honorable citation
• Purchase or lease of new training facility
• 12 new training employees
• To meet the community engagement target without reducing specialized unit staffing, APD hires even more officers: at a rate of 2.35/1,000k
• To meet the 2.35/1,000k rate, APD budgets for 2.5/1,000k

Total cost: $119.8M per year or $598.8M over five years

 

How seriously should we take this estimate?

I’m glad that the city is laying out all of the assumptions included in these estimates. As you can see, a lot of the assumptions are based on guessing what a future City Council might do: how high it will set wages and incentives and how many new facilities it deems necessary to accommodate the increased staff. My assumption is that if this referendum passes and is enforceable, Council will use whatever flexibility it has takes to reduce the cost, such as by making the incentives as low as possible or not authorizing new substations.

The population growth range is in line with what the city demographer has projected. Although the city population grew by more than 2% per year over the past decade, it has begun to slow down in recent years as more growth occurs outside of the city limits. Here is data from the past decade and the future projection:

Another area of flexibility is in wages. The cops are entering the final year of their five-year union contract, which gave them a 1% wage hike in the first year and 2% hikes in the last four. The city could certainly choose to take a less generous line in next year’s negotiations. But the cost of living is also steadily increasing, which will make it harder to recruit and retain new officers without offering pay raises.

The bottom line

The bottom line: the city is already facing a structural deficit due to the 3.5% tax limit put in place by the legislature two years ago. This new mandate will turn a manageable structural deficit into a full-blown fiscal crisis requiring the city to make big cuts to other services — fire, EMS, parks — and/or ask voters to approve significant tax increases above the 3.5% rate:

Measuring “community engagement” time

Another thing that’s up in the air is how to define and measure “community engagement” time. Is SAN simply referring to “uncommitted” time when patrol officers aren’t responding to a call? APD does try to measure that, but as I’ve noted before, their efforts have produced some dubious data, with wild swings in reported “uncommitted time” from year to year. For instance, this was the data APD reported in 2015, which showed uncommitted time plummeting from 27% to 14% in just two years, before rising again:

I asked APD if there were any requirements for how officers use uncommitted time, whether the department has in place any metrics for how they use it and if there is any explanation for the dramatic variations in reported spare time.

In a statement, I was told that uncommitted time is “simply time not on a call for service.” Furthermore:

This differs from community engagement time in that not all uncommitted time is used to engage the community. We do not have a process for actually measuring community engagement time at this point (in development).

Even measuring uncommitted time is not always simple, they conceded:

We calculate uncommitted time using an adopted formula which should be used the same way at all times. Having said that, it is not the same formula recommended by (the Matrix Report) which is why our target uncommitted time is lower than their recommendation. As well, there are issues with the process related to things like backup where time on call is often not recorded or not recorded well.

OK, so “community engagement” is not currently being measured but if and when it is measured, it will logically be a smaller subset of “uncommitted time.”

Well, the city manager clearly didn’t get this memo, since in his proposed budget this year, APD reported 31% “community engagement” time last year and is projecting the same level of community engagement for this year. This is despite what police leaders have repeatedly described as a severe staffing shortage:

Again, the point of showing you all of these conflicting numbers is just to demonstrate how subjective this metric is. It’s hard to say what effect the 35% “community engagement time” will be because there’s no universally accepted definition of community engagement time, let alone a universally accepted method of measuring it.

SAN responds

In a statement, Save Austin Now ridiculed the idea that the city couldn’t afford its proposed staffing mandate, saying that it was “on track to achieve” that level “just two years ago.”

Well, something big changed in the last two years. The state legislature dramatically restricted the city’s ability to raise revenue. The city was ramping up APD staffing back when it was regularly raising taxes by more than the current 3.5% cap. Now the city needs voter approval to go above that.

Second, whether or not this was intentional, there’s a difference between budgeting for a certain number of officers and a mandate that that number be on the payroll at all times.

It makes no sense that our elected officials have chosen to allocate $515M to homelessness over the next three years and raise taxes again this year, while simultaneously arguing that returning to an adequate police staffing level is financially impossible in the face of rising crime. In a rapidly growing city with a $4.2 billion budget, we can afford public safety.

This statement has a number of sleights of hand that will unfortunately fool most media covering this issue. First, the $515M refers to a goal for the total amount spent from a variety of sources in the community: the city, the county, nonprofits, private philanthropy. Second, City Council is quite likely to approve a budget that does not result in a tax increase for the average homeowner, although it will on commercial property owners. Third, the city’s budget is technically $4.2 billion but most of that is tied up in enterprise departments funded by user fees, notably the city-owned electric and water utilities. The only source of potential funding for cops is the $1.2 billion general fund.

This is not Prop B

In contrast to Prop B, which many elected liberals remained silent on, I expect this petition to be universally opposed by the local Democratic/liberal establishment.

This puts at risk the public services that liberals cherish: parks, libraries, social programs. And it’s accompanied by a hefty price tag that will put pressure on them to raise taxes — something that nobody wants. What will be interesting to see is if there are some right-of-center voices that emerge in opposition.

This is an excerpt from the Aug. 11 edition of the Austin Politics Newsletter. To get daily breaking news and analysis on city politics, click here to subscribe. 

This is an excerpt from the Aug. 16 edition of the Austin Politics Newsletter. To get daily breaking news and analysis on city politics, click here to subscribe. 

City budget officials say the police staffing initiative (Prop A) will result in major fiscal challenges, forcing the city to either make big cuts to other services or to ask voters to approve big tax hikes in the coming years.

But Prop A supporters can’t believe it. All they’re asking for, they say, is putting APD a little above where it was on track to be a couple of years ago.

“Our approved staffing two years ago was 1,959,” police association prez Ken Casaday said to me via text last week. “The Council had also agreed to add officers to this number over a five year period. So, where did the money go?”

Much of the incredulity is due to a nuance in the petition language that almost everyone who isn’t a professional budget analyst neglects:

That one word, “employment,” explains why the proposal is actually much more expensive than many of its supporters believe.

Two years ago, the city didn’t actually employ 1,959 officers. That number represents the authorized strength. The city budgets enough money to pay 1,959 officers, but there may be a significant number of vacancies. Typically the police department uses the money for the vacant positions to pay overtime.

So, if the law requires the city to always employ 2 officers per 1,000 residents, then that means that the city must budget for many more because vacancies will naturally occur due to retirements, resignations and (occasionally) firings.

The city budget office has estimated that to meet a 2 officers per 1,000 residents ratio at all times, it must actually budget for a ratio of between 2.35-2.5. That means it must budget for hundreds of positions more than it intends to fill.

Wait, why?

Hiring police officers isn’t as simple as hiring, say, an accountant. Every new officer has to go through the 8-month police academy. Just running the academy costs money –– to pay the instructors as well as the cadets.

Perhaps if the city were subjected to such a strict police staffing mandate, the city could find ways to recruit and train with greater flexibility. For instance, Mackenzie Kelly has proposed a way to get officers more affordably: a 4-month academy for a smaller number of recruits (30) who already have a state law enforcement certification. Many such recruits have experience as cops for other departments.

But there is a certain rigidity that is unavoidable. No one — at least no one I’m aware of — is suggesting we do away with or water down the required training. And if we’re going to require eight months of training, the most economical solution is to try to train as many cadets at once.

So here’s the current situation: As of the end of July, the police department had an authorized strength of 1,809 officers but it had 156 vacancies. So only 1,655 officers are actually employed. Now, there is a current academy class with 88 cadets who will become officers in February. But the city is losing about 15 officers a month, mostly to retirements. So it’s very possible that by the time we get 88 new officers, we will have lost another 90, meaning we’ll be at roughly the same number of employed officers

If we are going by the recently-released 2020 census figures, which put Austin’s population at 961,855, we will need to employ 1,924 officers if the mandate passes.

If the mandate is approved, we will need to immediately increase the force by nearly 300 officers. The petition says the city must run three academy classes a year until it achieves the ratio. I suppose if we do that we will eventually achieve that ratio.

But what about after we achieve the ratio? Each year we’ll have to run more academy classes than we likely need to make sure that the number of new cadets exceeds the retirements that year. The problem is you never know how many retirements there will be each year. This explains why the city would have to budget for more positions and always train more officers than required. This explains why the mandate is much more expensive than its authors may realize.

Hence the city’s estimate that it will cost an additional $54.3 million to $119.8 million a year.

The real tragedy of this mandate is not just that it would force us to spend much more money on law enforcement, but that it would require the city to spend on a very specific type of law enforcement. None of this money that would be roped off for the police department could be spent on anything except officers. It couldn’t be used to boost staffing or pay for the burnt out 911 center. It could not be used for equipment in the forensics lab.

And then there are the taxes…

The other big difference between two years ago and now are the state-imposed tax limits, which were signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2019 but did not go into effect until 2020.

The police staffing plan that Casaday and others point to was crafted back in the days when the city was able to increase taxes by up to 8% each year without voter approval. In the last three budgets before the new taxing limits went into effect, Council boosted the police budget by 5% in FY 2017-18, 7.6% in FY 2018-19 and 4% in FY 2019-20.

We couldn’t afford to keep this hiring pace up under the current 3.5% revenue limit without making major cuts to other departments. So the cost of SAN’s proposal, with the fateful employment word, is even more unrealistic.

By the way, back in 2019, city and county leaders from all over the state warned Republicans at the Lege that the revenue limits posed a serious threat to funding for law enforcement…

Do they even realize it?

There are two reasons why Save Austin Now may have written the fateful word, employed:

1. Cluelessness. Save Austin Now or Legislative Solutions, the legal consultant they paid $425 to help with “petition language creation,” simply didn’t realize the significance of the word employed
2. A conscious effort by Mackowiak and the GOP to starve other city services that conservatives don’t believe are necessary. Something to make the ghosts of Ronald Reagan and David Koch happy.
3. A conscious effort to turn voters against the city and its Democratic elected officials by forcing them to significantly raise taxes via one or more tax rate elections.

I tend to believe it’s mostly #1. But #2 and #3 are certainly on the table.

This is an excerpt from the Aug. 16 edition of the Austin Politics Newsletter. To get daily breaking news and analysis on city politics, click here to subscribe. 

About two years ago a reader of mine, a native Austinite in his 60’s, told me by email “that Austin is not anywhere close to as safe a city as it used to be.” Once upon a time, he related, people used to regularly go to bed with their doors unlocked and left their cars with the keys in the ignition. “I would not dream of that today,” he added.

While not challenging the wisdom of keeping one’s car keys on one’s person, I pointed out that Austin was by most metrics much safer than it had been at other points in his life. Like most other large U.S. cities, Austin’s overall crime rate was much lower in 2019 than it was 20 and 30 years before. For instance, here’s a chart from APD’s annual crime report in 2008, looking back at the prior 20 years:

And in the 2018 report, you can see that crime dropped further in the 2010’s:

So the crime rate in 2018 was about a third of what it was in 1990. An enormous drop. Violent crime didn’t actually drop much during the 90’s (for a few years it significantly rose) but it dropped significantly in the 2010’s, from around 600 per 100,000 to 400:

Finally, murders dropped dramatically in the late 90’s and early 2000’s…

And then mostly stayed flat, at about 3 to 4 murders per 100,000 residents throughout the 2010’s.

Austin was not at all unique in this regard. Below shows the national murder rate from 1986-2019, based on FBI data.

Anyway, despite all of this good news on crime over the previous 30 years, my reader’s perception that Austin was more dangerous than ever was not surprising. Americans tend to believe crime is rising even when the evidence says the opposite, although they are usually more pessimistic about the nation than their locale.

There are no doubt numerous factors feeding this misperception, but in Austin I would generally point the finger at the constant crime coverage in local media, particularly TV stations. And then in the past two years there has been an intense and largely fact-free campaign by conservatives at the state and local level to portray the city as a crime-infested hellhole in response to the decriminalization of camping and the modest reduction in police spending.

But then there’s 2021…

But in Austin and America overall, murders are way up this year. In the first six months of the year, Austin had 44 homicides, nearly matching 2020’s total of 48. If the second half of the year is as bad as the first, we’d hit a murder rate of between 8.5-9.0, which is what was normal in the bad old days of the late 80’s/early 90’s.

If we look back at the past 12 months, starting on July 19, 2020, there have 63 murders, a rate of about 6.3 per 100,000, the highest rate since 2003.

Now, the good news is that the second half of 2021 is off to a stellar start: there has not been a murder yet this month. So hopefully here and elsewhere around the country, the past year will prove to be an aberration, likely explained by the psychological and economic hardship of the pandemic.

It’s not Austin, it’s America

Even if Austin’s murder rate doubles, it will not come close to Dan Patrick’s claim that it’s one of the “most dangerous cities in America.”

And there definitely won’t be any basis for claiming that Austin’s rising murder rate was due to its “defunding” of the police department. The rise in killings is hardly confined to cities that championed progressive criminal justice policy. Cities like Houston, which boosted police spending last year, are experiencing the same thing.

Now, is a national increase in homicide a justification for investing more in police? That’s an argument that is worth having.

This is an excerpt from the July 12 edition of the Austin Politics Newsletter. To get daily breaking news and analysis on city politics, click here to subscribe. 

So on Friday City Manager Spencer Cronk released his proposed FY 2021-22 budget. As expected, he has proposed restoring the police department’s funding to its 2019 level to avoid “catastrophic” (his words) financial penalties from the state.

The ease with which the budget is being restored illustrates how overstated the whole “defunding” thing was last summer, at least in the near-term. There was only $23.3M in immediate cuts to APD’s budget, but roughly half of that came from canceling three police academy classes, a move that was partially reversed when Council restored funding for a new cadet class that kicked off at the beginning of June.

About half ($76M) of the $150M “cut” came from moving hundreds of civilian functions out of the police department: the 911 center, the forensics lab etc. And then there were $47M worth of APD programs that were put into the “regimagine” bucket — a sort of policy purgatory where they continued to exist as before but they were put on notice that they would eventually be “reimagined” in some undefined way. If the state had not intervened so quickly, perhaps those programs would have eventually been “reimagined,’ making it harder for Cronk to put the cat back in the bag.

If you look at the chart below, you’ll see that the number of civilian employees (circled in red) is going up by 315 over last year. That’s where the big change is. And you’ll also see below, in green, that the number of “sworn” APD positions (officers), is exactly the same as last year:

Remember, the number of funded positions ≠ the number of actual cops. Many of the positions are vacant due to retirements and resignations, which, contrary to what the police lobby says over and over again, have not meaningfully accelerated in the past year.

What is true is that the city’s police force is smaller than it has been in many years. According to this fun little KUT quiz that I think everyone should take, there were 1,083 police officers as of October of last year, which was roughly the same number as in 2016. This was partially due to Council’s suspension of the cadet classes but also due to a surge in retirements that began in 2018, two years before George Floyd’s killing.

Police union prez Ken Casaday tells me the association is “cautiously optimistic” about the budget but would like to fund a third cadet class, in addition to the two included in Cronk’s proposal. Casaday also would like to see some money for capital projects, including a new APD headquarters and a new substation in northwest Austin.

This is an excerpt from the July 12 edition of the Austin Politics Newsletter. To get daily breaking news and analysis on city politics, click here to subscribe.