Grits for Breakfast 6/15/2020
Time to consider disbanding police departments in Texas (and no, I'm not calling to "abolish" police)
Grits has been thinking a lot recently about the barriers to meaningful police reform in Texas and ways around them. Chief among those barriers is the state civil service code governing most larger police agencies and various police-union contracts authorized by it.
Both the civil service code and those contracts include provisions making it difficult to fire police officers who engage in misconduct and, in the case of the contracts, may lock in certain employment and spending levels that thwart efforts to divest money from police and reinvest in other services that make people safer.
In San Antonio, for example, 2/3 of fired officers get their job back, the Express-News reported recently. Repeatedly, officers at the center of high-profile misconduct episodes are reinstated by local civil-service commissions or arbitrators. It can be infuriating.
Long-time readers know the civil service code (Texas Local Government Code Chapter 143) has been the bane of Grits' existence for more than two decades. There are so many anti-accountability elements to it, it's mind boggling, and even folks like me who're familiar with its workings keep being surprised at how egregiously misguided are some of its provisions. E.g., I only recently learned about limitations on firing police chiefs, and I've been paying attention to these topics since 1995.
Grits has been among a vanishingly small group of people trying since the 1997 Texas legislative session to get some of these provisions changed, and we've never been successful. Texas has passed other policing reforms over the years, but in all that time, nobody's ever cracked the civil-service code nut in the Lone Star State. The police unions have been too powerful and reformers' natural institutional allies in that fight - police chiefs and the Texas Municipal League - have been too cowardly and restrained.
Plus, quite frankly, until about five minutes ago there simply wasn't broad-based support for police reform, even (perhaps especially) among Democrats. In Texas, at least (I can't speak to other states), all the folks now crowing that we must "abolish" the police were nowhere to be found when their budgets were ballooning over the last couple of decades.
More:
https://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2020/06/time-to-consider-disbanding-police.html
