This is a weekly newsletter sent on Fridays. The Dispatch provides interesting news bits you may have missed and short cultural context to better understand the Capital City. Our goal is to keep you informed enough to get through a dinner party.
A few weeks ago, I was at a dinner party when the subject changed to a question that has haunted the city in recent weeks: Does Austin have a serial killer? After an epic meal cooked by my friend Helen Hollyman, who writes The Link and hosts the Paddlefish Caviar Heist, among other things, our group sat around drinking wine and cobbling together the different case facts we had picked up.
“It’s very hard to just fall into the lake at the end of Rainey Street.”
“The profile of the victims is too similar.”
“What are the chances that two men go missing from the same place at the time of night and end up dead in the water within weeks of each other?”
I was — and remain — on the side of the skeptics, but that last statement caught my attention. I wrote a draft of this story, let it sit for a few weeks, and then Peter Holley published a piece in Texas Monthly on May 1 that is better than what I wrote. (This is not the first time Pete has written exactly what I wanted to write.)
And so I scrapped it and pivoted to what the intention of my story has been all along: Austin’s complete disinterest in what’s happening with our police department something that will only continue to harm us.
Why?
Our embarrassing voter turnout.
Our passiveness at being held in a police state.
Our inability to deal with the affordability issues to attract smart law enforcement.
Continued inaction on these three things will leave more Austinites dead on the streets. This should be the stuff of Reddit posts and Facebook groups and Twitter threads.
Shame on us
On Tuesday, Travis County finished early voting on Propositions A and B, which deal with oversight of the Austin Police Department. Prop A, penned by Equity Action, is a citizen-led ordinance that will “encourage accountability for officer misconduct and brutality.”
On the surface, Prop B seems to have a similar mission. It does not. Instead it would hand that oversight back to the police, where it most definitely does not belong. The language is vague and confusing, and is backed by Ken Cassidy and the Sundance Kids, aka the Austin Police Association.
Police oversight is one of the key issues that led thousands of Austinites to march through the streets in summer 2020. And yet less than 7% of registered voters have bothered to vote on it, according to Community Impact.
If you are reading this on Friday and haven’t voted, there is hope. The general election is Saturday, May 6. If you are reading this after Saturday and have not voted, then all I have to say is shame on you. These local elections matter more to the quality of our lives and the lives of our neighbors than presidential or even senatorial elections.
Figure it out. Get it done. And don’t complain until you do.
Occupied Austin
In March, the Austin Police requested the Texas Department of Safety (DPS) to help supplement the police force’s lagging response to 9-1-1 calls. (APD continues to have nearly 300 vacancies despite having the largest budget in the force’s history, but let’s discuss this later on.)
The good news? Crime has dropped.
A few weeks after the DPS calvary arrived, Austin Police Chief Joseph Chacon said violent crime had dropped by as much as 25%. As KUT points out, this is likely due in part because of those 9-1-1 response times. Before DPS, those times were averaging 12 minutes. In some areas where DPS has been patrolling, police have responded in as little as two minutes.
DPS is also upping patrols in primarily Latino neighborhoods, which has led to the bad news: Of those arrested by DPS on misdemeanor charges, 90% are Black or Latino. Together, these populations make up just 40 percent of Austin’s population. The math, it seems, does not add up.
(The Texas Tribune wrote a fantastic piece this week breaking this down. In response to the above, APD was quick to say they would push DPS into “other” parts of the city. For their part, DPS was happy to throw it write back at APD, telling the Austin City Council:
“You see an up in the number of Hispanic drivers, Latino drivers,” DPS Director Steve McCrawMcCraw said on Tuesday. “But that’s reflected in the area that we operate. And we operate in the area that APD wants us to [operate].”
Overnight, Austin has allowed stop-and-frisk to become the de facto way we interact with the police. (Though in car-centric Texas it’s pulled-over-and-frisked.) It’s the same pattern of behavior that led the Justice Department to investigate New York Police Department during Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s tenure. It’s the same pattern of behavior that led Dallas to expel DPS just three months after it launched a similar partnership.
And what is our own mayor doing about it? Not much. Kirk Watson made a lukewarm statement during the Austin City Council meeting, saying:
“The supplemental staffing has shown really real results in faster response times for assistance and decrease in violent crime… The traffic enforcement, however, has been troubling.”
Yes, troubling. But what’s not troubling to politicians is how crime plays at the polls. When crime is up, voters are unhappy and tend to take it out on those in charge. When crime is down, voters don’t really pay attention. And so it’s okay to take a lukewarm approach. And it’s especially okay when voter turnout on police propositions issues is dismally low.
What Do We Do?
This current police situation is unsustainable. When DPS came to Dallas in 2019 under similar circumstances, they ended up shooting a Black man 16 times for holding a handgun during a routine traffic stop. (“But he had a gun!,” to which I say, “This is Texas, and that’s a right afforded to everyone.”) APD has its own history of shooting men of color, but that’s another Dispatch for another time.
And the answer isn’t abolishing the police. It’s working within the system we have to keep fewer people from being victimized. And it begins with the same issue we have been discussing and failing on for years: affordability. Attracting smart talent means giving them a good quality of life, and a good quality of life does not mean living in Kyle and commuting an hour every day to your patrol in East Austin. It means making enough money so you can live and work in the same community. Living where you work has the added benefit of humanizing the experience, of understanding the nuance of things. It knits one into the fabric instead of being an undone thread.
It also means rethinking how police police, which, to his credit, Chief Chacon does seem more inclined to do than his predecessors. Researchers have increasingly pointed to expanding mental health services and getting rid of BS misdemeanor charges, like possessing small amounts of marijuana, both of which Austin has done. (Because it is a state-run department, DPS does enforce low-level misdemeanors. According to the Austin Chronicle, DPS has issued 1,360 citations since March, a 155% increase from last year. That’s a lot of high-stakes police interaction for crimes punishable only by a fine.)
We also need to make being a police officer a calling for those who want to help rather than a pseudo-military career. And that APD brand refresh should start with the organization that claims to be its biggest supporter: the Austin Police Association. APD will continue to have a nasty thorn in its side for as long as the Austin Police Association continues to use trickery rather than common sense. APA has repeatedly chosen to align itself with the right-wing Save Austin Now PAC in a city that overwhelming votes left. It’s an allegiance that may garner goodwill among top brass and other elites, but it does nothing to help the strengthen the relationship between the police department and the community.
It is easy to understand why our imagination is captivated by a potential serial killer. Austin has been captivated by gruesome deaths for three centuries — the Servant Girl Murders, Charles Whitman atop the UT Tower, the Yogurt Shop murders, and now the bodies in Lady Bird Lake. It’s the stuff of nightmares. It’s also distracting us at the task at hand. If we really care about safety, the safety of people walking home from Rainey Street, the safety of Black men being pulled over by DPS, the safety of a UT dance student walking on campus, then we must stay engaged. We must turn the dinner party conversation towards that which we can change.
Chad Wadsworth for Jo’s Coffee
5 things to know this weekend.
An Austin adjunct professor making $30,000 tells Bon Appetit what she eats in a week.
Austin’s magazine Tribeza (“the square one”) was acquired by Houston-based Paper City. I don’t know how I missed this in January, but if I missed it, I guess other people did, too.
The Texas Observer is (not*) gone after 68 years.
Austin needs dog fosters. I’m happy to answer any and all questions about dog fostering. (TL:DR: Fostering is very easy and rewarding.)
For the first time in a very long while, I’m excited about two restaurant openings: East Austin and downtown. (Jo’s Coffee also opened in South Austin.)