Work has begun on reshaping Austin’s Police Department and the public safety sector. That was the goal of the newly created city council Public Safety Committee’s first meeting.
Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk told Council everything should be on the table as they discussed changes to APD and the council’s idea of an adapted public safety system. “What I’m seeing is areas in which we can think differently about functions that had been allocated within the police department in a new way.”
The real problem facing Austin police is they are expected to do everything, many of those things having nothing to do with law enforcement said Council Member and Public Safety committee chair, Jimmy Flannigan, “and when you start to break this stuff down, you realize that we’ve given officers an impossible job…and that’s not fair to them either.” Flannigan said the key is reworking what police actually do, identifying the jobs better done by someone else and training people to do those jobs.
Cronk laid out a plan to divest funding from APD as well as some of its duties that could be pulled to other departments. “Some of those I highlighted like the forensic unit, our call dispatch system…victim service councilors, all those are things that need to be discussed in the coming months.” However Cronk added, some of these talks won’t be in time to make it to the 2021 budget but could be involved in the following fiscal year.
