Activists in Austin have advocated for greater civilian oversight in response. A coalition of progressive organizers pushed the city council to amend the city’s contract with the Austin Police Association (APA) in order to reduce barriers to accountability and to create an Office of Police Oversight. But the police union fought back, attempting to leash the newly empowered watchdog by blocking it from conducting independent investigations into complaints of misconduct against officers. 

Their confrontation came to a head this weekend. Activists put an ordinance on the municipal ballot to bolster and codify the powers of civilian oversight in the city. The police union and its supporters retaliated with a petition drive of their own, which deceptively bore the same name as activists’ version, and succeeded in putting a competing ordinance in front of voters to weaken oversight.

Austin voters on Saturday decisively sided with police reformers. A resounding 70 percent approved Proposition A, the measure that would bolster oversight of police. They overwhelmingly rejected Proposition B, the version supported by the police union, which received support from only 20 percent of voters.

Kathy Mitchell, a longtime advocate for police accountability in Austin who helped organize the campaign for Prop A, says the results illustrate strong support in the city for robust civilian oversight of police, and voters’ frustration at police efforts to push back against their organizing of recent years. 

“We have literally tried everything, there was no other way to enforce the stronger standards for oversight other than going to the voters and saying, ‘Okay, you’re going to have to show that this is something you expect,’ Mitchell said. “And now they have.” 

Mitchell says she hopes that Prop A’s strong showing empowers city officials to begin changing police oversight as early as this week, including pushing for independent review of complaints against officers and cases involving police violence. 

The results in Austin were a stark contrast to the overwhelming defeat of a different police reform ballot measure 80 miles south in San Antonio, which also held its municipal elections on Saturday. As Bolts reported last month, San Antonio activists petitioned for a more sweeping ballot measure, also called Proposition A, that sought to decriminalize weed and abortion as well as reduce arrests and jail time for minor charges, but faced inflammatory rhetoric and well-funded opposition from the police union and much of the city’s political establishment. 

Only 28 percent of San Antonio voters supported Prop A on Saturday. The result was a decisive win for the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association, one of the most powerful and combative police unions in the country. “Tonight, the voices of our great city were heard and heard loudly,” Danny Diaz, the union’s president, said during a victory party Saturday night. “We will not become another statistic, we will not tolerate criminal leniency, and we will not allow our city to crumble.” 

Prop A’s organizers issued a statement after the election accusing the police union and its supporters of “spreading fear tactics and lies” in its campaign against the ballot measure. “We still have to do a lot of public education. We’ve been doing it for several years and we’re going to continue,” Ananda Tomas, executive director of the police reform group that led the effort, told reporters Saturday night, according to the San Antonio Current. “We know when we’re at the doors and we break all of these things down, that folks are with us.”

The police union in Austin was no less defiant than San Antonio’s despite its defeat. “The APA simply will not stand by while this city and anti-police activists operate with blatant disregard for state law and the rights and protections afforded to our hardworking men and women,” the Austin Police Association tweeted on Saturday night.

Mitchell says it’s telling that the union is talking about state law and seems to be appealing more to Texas’ Republican leaders at this point than to local voters.

The Austin Police Association is advocating for a bill drafted by Republicans in the legislature that would prohibit civilian oversight of police departments that has already passed the Texas Senate and is now pending in the House. The legislation, which would undermine Austin’s new oversight ordinance by blocking access to police information until the department finishes investigating itself, mirrors measures that Republicans have pushed through elsewhere in the country. 

State-level Republicans have stepped in to protect local police in other ways. Republican governor Greg Abbott has publicly decried the prosecution of Austin police who brutalized protesters, and even appointed one of the officers indicted for assaulting demonstrators in 2020 to a state law enforcement commission. 

“Increasingly, and this has been going on for a while, APA is turning to the GOP to save itself from its own community,” Mitchell said. “They have decided strategically to stop talking to Austin, and that is remarkable, because they are our employees.” 

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The police union’s messaging, which has dominated San Antonio’s municipal elections this spring, wasn’t crafted to go after any particular mayoral or city council candidate, but rather to spread fear about Proposition A, a police reform charter amendment that local activists petitioned to get on the May 6 ballot. 

The so-called Justice Charter is broad in scope because it was drafted by a coalition of San Antonio groups representing causes ranging from organized labor to reproductive justice, which wanted to build on reforms local organizers have been pushing for years. It would add a “Justice Policy” to the city charter that calls for ending citations and arrests for low-level marijuana possession, an idea city council members have long paid lip service to but failed to fully implement, as well as decriminalizing abortion, which the council already directed the city’s police to do last August after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision triggered Texas’s criminal abortion ban. 

Prop A also calls for banning police chokeholds and no-knock warrants, both of which the San Antonio Police Department already has internal policies against. It would also direct police to prioritize citations over arrest and jail for people accused of certain low-level crimes, like theft below $750; this would codify and expand a cite-and-release policy that city and county law enforcement began implementing several years ago in the name of criminal justice reform. 

Police union rhetoric has already convinced many people in power in San Antonio to oppose it. The city’s chambers of commerce established their own PAC last month to raise money from business interests to campaign against the ballot measure and amplify the police union’s talking points. Most of the candidates running for city council this year oppose the Justice Charter, and Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who is expected to sail to re-election later this year, urged people to vote no in early April despite having previously voiced support for much of what’s in it.

Their opposition raises major questions about Prop A’s future even if it were to pass, as some local officials also signaled they would not implement whole swaths of the measure. Prop A could also be challenged by Republican officials who dominate state government and love to pick fights in Texas’ more liberal cities, and anti-abortion activists who already sued to try to stop the measure from appearing on the May ballot are likely to keep agitating should it win.

Still, Ananda Tomas, founder and director of ACT 4 SA, the police reform group that led the effort to get the Justice Charter on the ballot, says that the intense opposition from the police union and the backtracking from the mayor highlight why local activists are pushing reforms through citizen-led ballot initiatives in the first place. 

“I think not just here in Texas or San Antonio, but nationally, you’re seeing a lot more ballot initiatives as the people’s way of fighting back,” Tomas said. “When we have city or state leadership or even federal leadership that’s not moving with the people, then we’re going to take matters into our own hands, and that was the exact thinking behind this.”

Tomas’ group was born out of the massive protests and increased activism around police accountability that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. In 2021, Tomas and Act 4 SA gathered enough signatures to put a different measure on the ballot that sought to repeal police collective bargaining rights in San Antonio, which they had pitched as a means to begin addressing disciplinary procedures baked into the city’s police union contract that long shielded bad cops, sometimes even allowed awful ones back on the street, and yet had remained a third rail in local politics; officers the city’s police chief had tried to fire, but couldn’t, included a cop who berated and hurled racial slurs at a Black man while arresting him, an officer who was drinking on duty when he got into a gunfight and killed his girlfriend’s ex, and another who gave someone living on the street a sandwich with feces in it. 

Proposition B, the 2021 ballot measure, failed by two percentage points. But last year, when the police union negotiated a new contract with the city, it quickly agreed to tweak its arbitration process in order to give the police chief more power over firing decisions—a departure from previous contract talks, when disciplinary rules were essentially off limits and yet still negotiations could drag on in years of acrimony and litigation with city officials. 

“There was this whole narrative shift and power that the city was able to get in the negotiations by saying, ‘Hey, this is how close you guys came to losing your contract because people are so upset with how unaccountable it is,’” Tomas said. She thinks that the close vote over Prop B ratcheted up pressure to change the next contract. 

The history of the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association is a case study in how police unions amass and wield power in local elections. It dove headfirst into local politics in the 1980s when it started publicly endorsing and opposing candidates, created a political action committee to bankroll their supporters, and established a formidable phone banking operation ahead of elections. People running for city council who wouldn’t commit to better pay and equipment for cops were smeared as anti-police and pro-crime, and by 1988 San Antonio police had paved the way for other police unions by negotiating one of the best wage and benefits packages in the nation.

San Antonio’s police union became notorious for its brash approach to local politics. One former San Antonio mayor wrote in a memoir about turning down police union money ahead of an election in the 1990s and receiving a gift basket with a dead rat in return. Politicians started calling the police union president at the time “The 44 Caliber Mouthpiece.” In 2013, after San Antonio’s then-city manager Sheryl Sculley established a task force to study reforming officers’ generous benefits because she thought they were threatening financial disaster for the city, one high-profile business leader on the benefits task force reported being tailed in his car by police officers. Sculley felt so aggrieved after battling the city’s public safety unions that she wound up writing a book chronicling the experience, which she titled “Greedy Bastards.”  

With its fiery campaign against Prop A this year, the police union is again fighting back against what little reform it has been forced to accept in recent years. It has opposed the local cite-and-release program since Bexar County’s reform-minded district attorney spearheaded it after taking office four years ago, and which the Justice Charter aims to strengthen. The DA and his supporters say the program has saved the county $5.6 million in jail booking costs, helped alleviate overcrowding at the dangerous county lockup, and diverted thousands of people with petty, non-violent charges towards services.

Danny Diaz, president of San Antonio Police Officers’ Association, said in an interview with Bolts that cite-and-release policies have fueled an uptick in crime that was reported in San Antonio as well as cities across the country during the pandemic, even in places without such changes. But the city’s longtime police chief, William McManus, who does not support Prop A, has rejected that notion, and the DA’s office reports a recidivism, or re-offense, rate for defendants in the cite-and-release program of 9.6 percent compared 38 percent for people booked into the county jail. 

Diaz insisted that the police union’s terrifying vision of what could happen if Prop A passes is “realistic”—that decriminalizing marijuana and abortion, in addition to codifying and expanding cite-and-release, would really allow dangerous criminals to escape consequences, force business across San Antonio to close, and plunge the city into chaos. But he also struggled when asked for evidence. How, as he argued, would local businesses and the community at large be worse off if more people accused of low-level theft got a citation and summons to appear in court instead of being hauled to jail? “I’ll put it as simply as I can,” Diaz said. “As children, we were all taught not to lie, cheat or steal. This proposition is basically telling people you can steal.”

Diaz, a former SWAT officer, also insisted that decriminalizing marijuana was a slippery slope but again sputtered general talking points about lawlessness when pressed. “If they’re not convicting or going to court or going to jail or giving fines for maijuana, they’re gonna turn around and do the same thing for theft on cite-and-release,” he said. 

The police union’s ads and public statements over Prop A are also divorced from the reality of what’s actually in the ballot measure, claiming for instance that it seeks to decriminalize offenses like graffiti. But a cite-and-release program, which is meant to avoid people’s stay in jail, does not “decriminalize” since people would still be subject to criminal penalties.

Currently, it seems unlikely that any sweeping policy changes would immediately follow passage of the Justice Charter; San Antonio’s city attorney has already claimed that much of what’s in it is unenforceable. But part of what’s motivating the police union’s attacks on Prop A is the concern that a win would put pressure on future city councils to go further.

Diaz said he’s worried about more “activists” making it onto the council in the future and pushing to implement elements of the Justice Charter, especially if they see this year’s vote as a clear referendum by residents. He pointed to two progressive council members, elected in 2021, who voted against the union’s last contract for not going far enough on reforms to police discipline and oversight, and are now supporting the ballot measure. 

The single element of the ballot measure that city officials have said they would implement has also riled the police union. It would create a new position at city hall, a Justice Director, someone without ties to law enforcement appointed by city council to review public safety policy, hold regular stakeholder meetings with communities that are heavily policed or have complaints about officers, and help mediate conflict between police and the public. The police union has, unsurprisingly, ridiculed the idea of appointing someone without policing experience to monitor them. But Prop A supporters have called it their best attempt to bolster independent oversight of the San Antonio Police Department, which is currently paper thin, even compared to dysfunctional oversight bodies in Texas’ other large cities. 

Progressive organizers in other Texas cities have turned to local ballot measures to force reforms that local elected officials are refusing to consider or failing to fully implement. While most of those campaigns centered on marijuana, San Antonio’s is the most expansive and the first attempt by a Texas city to decriminalize abortion since the end of Roe.

But these initiatives are also a kind of end-run around an anemic and poorly organized Texas Democratic Party. One recently-formed statewide group, Ground Game Texas, has thrown itself into helping local organizers, including the coalition of San Antonio activists pushing Prop A, raise enough signatures to put reform measures on their local ballots.

Mike Siegel, who helped start Ground Game after twice running for a central Texas congressional seat on a progressive platform, said that the point of their work isn’t just to mobilize voters and build coalitions across the state, but also to force debates whenever people in power dig in their heels. “We’re starting fights,” Siegel said. “I think that’s the most important thing we’re doing, and I think that really is in some ways the core of Ground Game, kind of a catalyst, an allied group that partners with local organizations that have deep roots in the community.” 

“Now we are head-to-head as a coalition with the anti-abortion lobby and the pro-cop lobby, which are two extremely formidable forces,” Siegel said. 

Lingering questions over implementation, as well as fearmongering and misinformation by the police union, have clouded what’s actually at stake in San Antonio’s upcoming Justice Charter vote. But Yaneth Flores, policy director at the abortion rights group Avow Texas, insists that the threats pregnant people face in light of the state’s total abortion ban underscore the importance of taking a stand at the local level and codifying protections. 

“I think that’s the right path for us, to say that as a city we are not buying into the fascist policies of the state,” Flores said. “I’m not exaggerating when I say that, because we are being robbed of having autonomy to make our own health care decisions.”

In addition to presenting it as a local bulwark against increasingly extreme anti-abortion laws at the state level, Prop A supporters hope that it sparks a deeper debate about what kind of criminal legal system San Antonio voters want. “At the end of the day, a really significant part of this ballot initiative has to do with a fundamental question of whether or not we as a community think that sending people to jail and having them sit there away from their families, away from their job away from their lives, is the best way to solve crime in our communities,” said Alejandra Lopez, president of the San Antonio Alliance, the local teachers union that backs the ballot measure.

Lopez said that part of the reason she has been personally working to pass the Justice Charter is because, as a teacher, she’s seen first hand how a criminal charge for pot or a stupid mistake like graffiti can derail a young person’s life and disrupt their family. She added that she’s disturbed by the inflammatory, streets-on-fire message by opponents. “The lies that are coming out of the opposition on this, we should all be troubled,” Lopez said. “We should be troubled deeply to our core about those tactics.”

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For decades, San Antonio’s police union has served as a national model for winning outsize salaries and benefits, instating policies that shield officers from accountability, and aggressively building political power to silence elected officials who question these conditions. But that playbook may be nearing its final chapter this week as the Texas city’s residents consider a ballot initiative that would rescind the union’s collective bargaining rights.

Last year, local ABC affiliate KSAT produced an investigative series about the city police department’s unusually high rate of officers who, despite being disciplined and fired, were ultimately reinstated. Since 2010, about two-thirds of fired officers have rejoined the force.

Some of the stories caused nationwide outrage, including that of Matthew Luckhurst, who was fired in 2016 for giving a homeless man a feces sandwich. His lawyers got him his job back. Lee Rakun, another officer, was reinstated six times despite being fired for behavior that included posting a bigoted epithet on social media, verbal harassment of an off-duty constable, abandoning his post for personal reasons, and even beating three women, including a girlfriend.

In these cases, it was provisions in the San Antonio Police Association’s contract that enabled officers who committed egregious acts to return to work.

The findings spurred local activists to found the police reform advocacy group Fix SAPD. 

“We took a deeper dive into the [KSAT] report and saw throughout the country that there’s a problem among officers who have grounds termination but stay on the force,” said Oji Martin, one of Fix SAPD’s founders. “If you look at each officer who killed an individual, there were some instances where they were reprimanded. But a consistent theme involved arbitration in the union contracts. That’s when we looked at the San Antonio Police Officers Association’s contract.”

Now Fix SAPD is campaigning to repeal the laws that enable the union’s disproportionate advantage in contract negotiations. Their first test comes in the city election on Saturday with a ballot referendum, Proposition B.

“Our primary question is why is it so hard for officers to be fired and held accountable for their actions? It went from a simple question to a ballot initiative,” said Ananda Tomas, Fix SAPD’s deputy director.

If passed, Proposition B would repeal Chapter 174 of the state government code, which allows police and firefighter unions to collectively bargain with the city. San Antonio is one of the few major Texas cities where police use collective bargaining. Without collective bargaining, San Antonio police could instead use the meet-and-confer process, similar to Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston. Fix SAPD supports this alternative because it doesn’t involve binding arbitration, which gives the police union substantial leverage. It also would pave the way for San Antonio residents to be able to vote on the police contract if they don’t agree with the terms. “There should be civilian oversight,” Martin said. “We should be able to have a say. Currently they can do what they want, and we are left at a disadvantage. We can watch the process, but we want to do more than watch.”

To get there, Proposition B would need to pass, and then the group would have to go through another petition drive to repeal Chapter 143 of the state code, which Tomas described as a “law enforcement bill of rights.” It includes provisions on hiring, firing, and public records that give police lopsided benefits.

“It’s a braided system, booby-trapped with barriers. You have to repeal one to repeal the other,” Martin said.

The current police union contract is set to expire at the end of September and negotiations over a new contract are underway. If Proposition B passes, negotiators will have to start all over again; wages, healthcare, and disciplinary procedures will be up for discussion with fewer strictures limiting what the city can do.

This would be a significant change for the union. Its strength has been entrenched since the 1980s when it adopted the tactics of a zealous former police officer turned union organizer, Ron DeLord, who is now nationally recognized for the playbook he developed in Texas. Intimidation is central to the strategy he has promoted; a recent New York Times profile of DeLord notes that in the 1980s, the San Antonio police union sent an Easter basket with a dead rat in it to a City Council member who wanted to cut police costs. DeLord is the chief negotiator for the San Antonio Police Officers Association and lately he has softened his approach; he told the Times that unions need to compromise or else seem “tone deaf” to communities that are calling for change.

But Martin says the power dynamic won’t shift unless Proposition B passes. “The union has a playbook to push back on any efforts [by the City Council] to fix the contract. They could recruit a candidate against an incumbent or withhold funds,” she said.

The overwhelming influence of police unions has become commonplace across the country. Simon Balto, an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Iowa, said that beginning in the 1960s, police unions went from largely typical labor bargaining groups to political machines attached to the New Right movement. “They weren’t involved in formal electoral politics,” he said. But with the emergence of the culture wars, police found a common ally in conservative Republicans who promoted law and order––the type of messaging that still endears police to people across the political spectrum.”

Proposition B could signal a turning point away from this long history. Jon Taylor, a professor and chair of the department of political science and geography at The University of Texas at San Antonio, thinks Prop B supporters have a chance, given the national dialogue on policing.

“Frankly, if the last year of police-related issues has taught us anything, it’s the notion that a police department with bad officers that can’t get rid of them isn’t going to be strong, capable, community-connected, or well-trained. If the police union can’t concede that there is a need to fire officers for misconduct permanently, then San Antonio voters might be more inclined to vote ‘yes,’” he said.

Fix SAPD’s campaign differentiates police unions from other unions, and highlighting the disciplinary component of contract negotiations is key to their argument. “They are using discipline as a bargaining chip to get whatever they want.” Tomas said. “Normal unions don’t bargain that way. Collective bargaining is a tool for civil rights. [Police officer associations] are using it as a tool against civil rights and the oppressed.”

The San Antonio Police Officers Association did not respond to requests for comment from The Appeal: Political Report.

The Fix SAPD campaign is shining light on the nationwide debate about police unions’ role in the labor movement. Last year, the Martin Luther King, Jr. County Labor Council, the central labor organization for the Seattle metropolitan area, expelled the Seattle Police Officers Guild. Labor Notes called it a test of police unions’ place within labor organizing.

But national labor groups, including the AFL-CIO, have overall declined activists’ demands to reject police unions. In response to Proposition B, state and local labor leaders are not backing down. The San Antonio Central Labor Council opposes the ballot initiative.

“Police unions aren’t opposed by people on the center-left,” Balto said. “Democrats aren’t going to bash them even though the unions bash Democrats.” This may be why recent polling shows a tight race.

Taylor says it’s a toss-up. “Municipal elections are notorious for low turnout in Texas—particularly on a Saturday. While there is a pretty good-sized coalition of proponents for Prop B, there are also some strong union groups who are good at mobilizing and may very well make the difference. If the limited polling is any indicator, Prop B has a chance to pass,” he said.

The debate over Proposition B is shaping other races on the ballot, which includes mayoral and City Council elections. Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who is facing former Councilmember Greg Brockhouse in a rematch from his 2019 race, is taking no official stance on the measure, while voicing general support for collective bargaining. Brockhouse, who is trying to shed his image as a right-wing pundit accused by multiple partners of domestic violence, is vociferously opposed to Proposition B and has attacked Nirenberg on the matter. Councilmember Roberto Treviño, who is also up for re-election, is the only incumbent to declare his support for the reform. But momentum may pick up now that former mayor and presidential candidate Julián Castro has spoken out in favor of Proposition B.

“By voting yes on Proposition B, we’re supporting good faith negotiations between police and the community they serve,” Castro said in a video posted on Twitter. “I’m all for paying officers what they deserve, but accountability for bad officers doesn’t belong at the bargaining table. When bad officers act out, they should face the consequences, and that should be non-negotiable.” 

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