From the Editors of the Austin American-Statesman: We need reform. Abbott gave us a campaign stop.

This editorial by the editors of the Austin American-Statesman provides helpful, if urgent, guidance for police reform. We should all be concerned that Texas also allows no-knock warrants of the kind that resulted in Breonna Taylor's death.  In fact, as per this February 1, 2019 article published in the Texas Monthly titled, "A No-Knock Raid in Houston Led to Deaths and Police Injuries. Should Police Rethink the Practice?" a similar horrific situation arose in Houston last year.

In response to Black Lives Matters together with the Austin Police Department's own culpability in aggressive policies leading to unnecessary death and injury, the current proposed city budget that you can read about here goes into effect on October 1, 2020, reducing the APD budget from $434 million to around $290 million, reapportioning it to social services and an alternative safe policing program.

In the meantime and in response, Gov. Greg Abbott supports legislation that would punish cities that make police force reduction cuts by withholding from local governments opportunities for city growth via tax revenues and denying them annexation powers. These bills are on the horizon for the next Texas legislative session that re-convenes in January, 2021.

I want to thank the editors of the Austin American-Statesman for calling out Abbott's lack of leadership while offering clear directions for policy.

-Angela Valenzuela

#EndPoliceViolence #endpolicebrutality #atxcouncil @austintexasgov #SayHerName #SayHerNameBreonnaTaylor #CJReform #TexasCJC

Editorial: We need reform. Abbott gave us a campaign stop.

by American Statesman Editorial Board

September 27, 2020

What a squandered opportunity.

After months of Texans holding largely peaceful protests demanding changes in the way communities are policed, Gov. Greg Abbott took to the stage this week to discuss public safety. His big announcement? Rioters who assault police officers, hurt others or cause property damage — crimes already punishable by jail time — should face stiffer penalties.

Certain illegal acts should be even more illegal.

Of course, such behavior is dangerous and intolerable. Such acts have been the outliers, though, in the otherwise nonviolent protests in Texas over the past few months, since George Floyd’s death galvanized calls to end abusive police practices. Yet Abbott shamefully squandered this important moment, ginning up outrage about rioters and ignoring the deeper injustices that brought protesters to the streets to begin with.

Perhaps we should have expected as much: Abbott’s appearance was a campaign event, and his message played nicely into the Republicans’ law-and-order mantra this election season. But in this moment, Texans needed Abbott to discuss policing not as a politician, but as our governor.

We should be talking about no-knock warrants and SWAT raids. Abbott’s press conference came the day after a Louisville, Kentucky, grand jury cleared police officers for killing Breonna Taylor during a horribly botched SWAT raid of her apartment. Just sit with that for a moment: The law allows police to get warrants to bust into people’s homes while they sleep, and officers can use deadly force if a resident, like Taylor’s boyfriend, opens fire on the people he thinks are intruders.

Last year a Houston couple died in a similar type of violent and unnecessary raid. Authorities later indicted an ex-Houston cop for allegedly falsifying information to get the warrant.

The larger practice of no-knock raids still cries out for dramatic reform. This tactic should be reserved for only the most extraordinary cases and justified by rigorous vetting. No one else should die in their own home from a pointless raid.

We should be talking about banning chokeholds and requiring de-escalation. Both are provisions of the George Floyd Act proposed last month by the Texas Legislative Black Caucus. Neither should be controversial with anyone who watched the video of Floyd gasping to breathe in his final moments, a Minneapolis police officer’s knee pressed into his neck.

We should be talking about ending arrests for fine-only offenses. As we’ve noted before, these arrests drive up jail costs for taxpayers, contribute to overcrowding and burden defendants with a jail stay when a simple summons to appear in court would do. Ending such arrests is also a component of the George Floyd Act, and if we’re serious about addressing racial inequities, this is one of the places to start. Among those facing these low-level charges, the data show minorities are more likely to go to jail and whites are more likely to get a ticket.We should be talking about reining in pretextual traffic stops. Because Sandra Bland, pulled over in 2015 for failing to use her turn signal when changing lanes, didn’t have to die in a Waller County jail cell. Because Javier Ambler II, pulled over last year after failing to dim his headlights and then fleeing from Williamson County deputies, didn’t have to die after repeated jolts from a Taser.

We should be talking about police tactics against protesters. We recognize officers need tools to defend themselves or to disrupt a gathering that has turned dangerous. But we’ve also seen the horrific head injuries Austin police inflicted — in some cases on bystanders — by using so-called “less lethal” ammunition on protesters in May. APD has since stopped using lead pellet-filled “beanbag” rounds for crowd control. Lawmakers should make that prohibition statewide.

We could go on. Qualified immunity. Police training. Transparency when someone dies in police custody. Abbott had his pick of important public safety issues to discuss this week. He chose instead to rail about rioters.

What a waste. Texans hunger for real public safety reforms. Abbott was content to play politics as usual.

'You Promised You Wouldn’t Kill Me' Atatiana Jefferson, Natasha McKenna and the other black women we forget.

Do read this poignant, anguishing piece written by the renowned Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a black feminist legal theorist and scholar, on the killing of Black women by police. 

Sadly and tragically, and unlike their male counterparts who die at the hands of police violence in disproportionate numbers, their names are too soon forgotten. According to data released by the Fatal Interactions with Police research project, disproportionality is true for Black women, too:

"It’s true that more men of all races are killed by the police than are women. But black women make up less than 10 percent of the population and 33 percent of all women killed by the police."

While we desperately need to end to such rogue police violence, let's not also commit symbolic violence by invisibilizing their victims.  

-Angela Valenzuela

#SayHerName

'You Promised You Wouldn’t Kill Me'

Atatiana Jefferson, Natasha McKenna and the 

other black women we forget.

By Kimberlé Crenshaw

| Oct. 28, 2019

Dallas—On Thursday, I went to the funeral of Atatiana Jefferson, 28, who was shot to death by a police officer from outside her bedroom window this month. My companion there was Rhanda Dormeus, whose daughter Korryn Gaines was also killed by the police in her home. As we watched people file by the coffin, we thought, “This can’t keep happening.”

Ms. Jefferson was killed after a neighbor noticed her doors were open in the early hours of the morning and called a nonemergency police line for help. The two officers who responded did not announce themselves as the police as they sneaked around the yard and peeked into the house.

The death of Ms. Jefferson has mobilized activists, community members and commentators to demand sweeping changes. But if history is any guide, the masses will not recognize her name, as they do Eric Garner, Michael Brown or Tamir Rice. It’s not that we lack stories of black women killed by the police; rather, it seems that we don’t know what to do with them.

Consider Natasha McKenna, who died in early 2015 days after six sheriff’s deputies in Fairfax County, Va., shackled her outside her jail cell, wrestled her to the ground and then shocked her with a stun gun over and over. “You promised you wouldn’t kill me,” she pleaded. Those words should have become a rallying cry. Instead, most people have never heard them.

The families of these women often suffer in relative obscurity. Their daughters’ deaths don’t elicit the marches or news coverage that could catalyze accountability. When most people think about anti-black violence, like lynchings or police killings, they think about men. Women rarely come to mind first. That’s why I created the #SayHerName hashtag to counter this tendency.

It’s true that more men of all races are killed by the police than are women. But black women make up less than 10 percent of the population and 33 percent of all women killed by the police. Data released by the Fatal Interactions with Police research project indicates that from May 2013 to January 2015, more than 57 percent of black women were unarmed when killed. And they are “the only race-gender group to have a majority of its members killed while unarmed.”

They are killed in many of the same circumstances as men, but critically, their being female does not inoculate them from the rapid escalation — often fueled by race-based fear — that often happens. Police officers with eager trigger fingers don’t care if a woman’s child is next to her, or India Kager and Korryn Gaines might still be with us, or if a child might die during a police raid, as Aiyana Stanley-Jones’s tragic death illustrates. Being elderly, homeless or mentally incapacitated does not seem to give police officers pause, as the losses of Kathryn Johnston, Margaret LaVerne Mitchell and Pearlie Golden reveal. Neither does being in one’s own home, or Michelle Cusseaux and Kayla Moore’s lives might have been spared.

The silence around black women is not simply a matter of indifference. It happens even in spaces created for them. When I and a group of bereaved mothers who lost daughters went to the 2017 Women’s March, only mothers of men killed by the police were invited on stage. I still remember the devastated looks on their faces when they realized their losses would remain obscured.

If we want to get a broader sense of the problem here, we have to be able to critique both race and gender conventions and stereotypes, and usually class, too. We must consider implicit and explicit biases against black women. Their interactions with the police may be different from those of white women and, in some ways, black men as well.

All black people would be safer with police reforms that reduce their interactions with law enforcement in public and at home. Black women are more likely than black men to engage with police officers when they knock on doors making welfare or mental health checks. These seemingly benign nonemergency calls can put them at risk.

In 2017, Texas enacted the Sandra Bland Act, named for a woman who died. A key provision is mandatory de-escalation training for police officers. But it’s unclear whether the officer who killed Atatiana Jefferson underwent such training; his behavior on the night of her death suggests that neither he nor his partner followed police protocol.

So simply altering police training won’t protect black women. We must create penalties and disincentives around the use of excessive force. It’s a damning indictment of a broken system that the Sandra Bland Act, which ostensibly sought to prevent future deaths, didn’t seem to have any impact in Ms. Jefferson’s case.

Ms. Jefferson’s mother was too sick to attend her daughter’s funeral. In a letter that was read aloud, she wrote, “You often said you were going to change the world.” If her senseless killing catalyzes reforms that ensure policing is about protection and service, rather than fear and punishment, then she will have changed the world.

#SayHerName