AUSTIN, Texas — It has been nearly six years since protests around George Floyd’s death swept through cities nationwide, which led to calls to “defund the police” in some Texas cities.
In the summer of 2020, tensions between Austin police and thousands of community members reached a boiling point. For many, it was a rallying cry for police reform, sparked after a bystander captured images of a police officer in Minneapolis restraining a suspect in an arrest by kneeling on his neck.
“People were appalled at what they were seeing with other police departments across the country,” said Paige Ellis, an Austin City Council member since 2019.
In August 2020, Ellis and her colleagues voted to take away $150 million from the Austin Police Department’s budget. It was an effort to re-envision public safety by moving the money toward housing, public health and mental health services.
“It has had some great conversations come out of it. It has also had some impacts that I don’t think we could have seen coming,” said Ellis.
About a year later, the City of Austin reversed course and restored the police budget. It came after state lawmakers signed a law into place that would penalize cities for taking money from the police budget.
According to Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, these are some of the legislations passed during that time:
House Bill 1900: Freezes property tax revenues for cities with a population over 250,000 that defund the police. Under this law, cities that defund the police will lose their annexation powers for 10 years and any area annexed by a defunding city in the past 30 years can vote to dis-annex from the city. It also allows the state of Texas to withhold sales taxes collected by a defunding city and give it to the Texas Department of Public Safety to pay for the cost of state resources used to protect residents of a defunded municipality.
House Bill 2366: Enhances criminal penalties for the use of laser pointers and creates an offense for the use of fireworks to harm or obstruct the police.
Senate Bill 23: Requires voter approval to reduce law enforcement budgets in counties with a population of more than 1 million. If voter approval is not received but the county still defunds the police, the county’s property tax revenue will be frozen.
By 2023, record-high funding for the Austin Police Department received approval: $476.5 million. The money went toward officer pay raises, overtime, hiring and retention incentives.
However, the current police chief, Lisa Davis, said recruiting remains a challenge. The city is still down nearly 340 officers, which is almost triple the number of vacancies compared to pre-2020 levels.
“Over the years, we’ve seen those resources go up. Chief Davis, just last August, had reassigned about 70 police officers who were not on patrol. And she put them back onto patrol to help cover overtime costs and to make sure that their response times were increasing,” said Ellis.
Six years later, the City of Austin is still reinventing public safety.
“We want to make sure folks have those types of resources so that, you know, they’re not ending up interacting with officers as their first call for help,” said Ellis.