Austin Justice Coalition's Chas Moore | Submitted
Austin Justice Coalition's Chas Moore | Submitted
The Austin Justice Coalition wants the Austin City Council to cut at least $100 million from the police department’s budget, but the Austin Police Association says the department is short-handed and budget constrained by labor contract obligations.
“We don't think they need explosives, militarized toys and weapons so, let's get rid of that," said Chas Moore, president of the Austin Justice Coalition. "We don’t think they need huge mounted horses that they pay to feed and stable so, let’s get rid of that. Practically, there are lots of things the city could get rid of to free up some funds to put elsewhere.”
The call for cuts came after Black Lives Matter protests swept the nation in response to the murder of George Floyd, a black man, on May 25 by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer in Minneapolis.
Ken Casaday, president of the Austin Police Association
| Austin Police Association website
“We believe that for issues like mental health, substance abuse and people experiencing homelessness, policing is not the answer and we have to start putting money and resources into the answers for those problems or we will perpetuate this cycle of policing, putting people in jail when in actuality they need help or they need resources to get out of their current situation,” Moore told the Austin News.
Ken Casaday, president of the Austin Police Association, says $100 million of the current $423 million budget represents 23 percent of the overall budget when 92 percent of the budget goes toward officer benefits.
“We've got a labor contract for three more years so it can't come from the benefits,” Casady told Austin News. “They could cut back over the next five to six years but you can't take a hundred million dollars out of a $423 million budget overnight.”
In addition, Casaday said the department was already shorthanded before COVID-19 due to police officers retiring and not being replaced.
“We’ll probably blow our overtime budget halfway through the year this year,” he said.
The Austin Police Department currently employs 1,959 workers, according to media reports.
“We're losing officers at a very rapid pace and it's making the community unsafe,” Casaday said in an interview. “If there was a hiring freeze, we would have to live with the consequences.”
Casaday agrees with the Austin Justice Coalition, however, that mental health calls could likely be handled by a different agency, but Texas law forces the police department to respond.
“The reason mental health calls are placed on us even though we're not professional counselors is because state law mandates that committing people for mental health evaluations must be ordered by police officers or medical doctors so it ties our hands and the city’s hands but, yes, I think mental health calls could be handled by someone else,” Casaday said.
Moore points to programs such as the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) in Seattle and Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) at the White Bird Clinic in Eugene, Oregon as models that could be adopted and invested in by the city of Austin.
“CAHOOTS had the very simple idea of not sending cops to 911 mental health calls anymore and to instead send social workers and other people who have been trained and educated to deal with people who are going through mental health challenges and what’s happened is nobody has died,” Moore said in an interview. “That shows you that when we invest in alternatives to policing, we are actually able to help people and get better outcomes.”