“There Are No Checks and Balances”: Two Texas Criminal Justice Experts on the Fight for Police Reform; Scott Henson and Chas Moore have been working for years to stop police brutality. They say that sweeping, systemic change is needed
By Amal Ahmed
Texas Monthly
June 5, 2020
On May 25, a Minneapolis police officer
kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, killing him on
camera. Every night since then, protesters have taken to the streets to
call for justice for Floyd, and for far too many other black people who
have been shot and killed by cops. In city after city, in all fifty
states, protesters have been tear-gassed and surrounded by police in
riot gear, prompting even larger crowds the next day. Many Texans are
now speaking out against police brutality for the first time, but the
fight to reform police departments isn’t new.
Scott Henson has been working in Texas’s
criminal justice reform sphere for two decades, chronicling every angle
of it on his blog, Grits for Breakfast, since 2004. A former journalist and political consultant, he also served as the executive director of the Innocence Project of Texas and the ACLU of Texas’s Police Accountability Project.
Chas Moore is the founder and executive
director of the Austin Justice Coalition, which had initially planned
the protests last Sunday in Austin. Moore ultimately decided to cancel
the event after protests on Saturday resulted in civilian injuries. In
April, after an Austin police officer shot and killed an unarmed man
named Mike Ramos, the coalition joined several grassroots organizations
in calling for the firing of police chief Brian Manley. They also helped push the City of Austin to negotiate a new contract with the police union that included important wins for transparency.
Henson and Moore have been working together on criminal justice reform and accountability since 2015. Texas Monthly
spoke with them about the recent protests, why police reform is harder
than it seems, and what the media gets wrong when reporting on the
police.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Texas Monthly: Were
either of you surprised to see the images from this weekend, when it
seems that the cops were being pretty confrontational toward
protesters?
Scott Henson: Not me. That’s par for the course.
Chas Moore: I agree. I
think it would be very naive to assume that [the cops] would actually
understand why people were out there and that they would change
overnight, or over seventy-two hours. Cops are going to be cops.
SH: In fact, the only real difference is that the tactics that are normally reserved for black folks got used on everybody.
TM: Are there certain practices and policies that have led to this moment?
SH: It’s politics. The
majority of both parties have had a bipartisan consensus that basically
says, “Whatever the police want, the police get.” And that has been for
my entire adult lifetime, certainly the last thirty years and going back
to Nixon’s war on crime.
The police unions’ political power is a
big part of it. Prosecutors are allied with police, so it doesn’t matter
if you’re a Democrat or a Republican: if you have that job, you’re not
gonna prosecute cops because you have to work with them every day.
CM: There’s a lack of
checks and balances when it comes to police accountability. The strength
of police departments over a really long period of time has led to
police departments, not only in Texas but around the country, being able
to run around and do whatever they want. From every part of the
criminal legal system, nobody checks them at all.
TM: In the past week, it seems as though there has been more conversation about demilitarization and abolishing
or defunding the police, at least on social media. That wasn’t
mainstream a few years ago, so what direction do you see that going?
SH: When people say
“abolish the police,” what they mean is scaling it back. We have used
law enforcement to confront a variety of social issues where it was
inappropriate. We’ve used them to confront addiction. We’ve used them to
confront homelessness. We’ve used them to confront mental health. These
are morally bankrupt and practically failed policies. And so what
[people mean by abolition] is taking police out of those situations,
reducing their budgets significantly, and shifting that money to social
services.
The reality is because we have police
doing all this stuff, they’re not doing actual police work that they
should be doing well. Clearance rates for murders, for armed robberies,
for burglaries are far lower than they should be. You’re hearing the
“abolish police” rhetoric, but the agenda is a little more nuanced than
that.
CM: I think this is
interesting, because I’m one of the people that Scott doesn’t believe
exists [laughs]. I think we can get to a world where we don’t need
police. You know, when I think about the origins of policing and where
we are today, it’s the thing that keeps me going to do this work. So how
do we completely get rid of policing the way it is today? I absolutely
believe in a world where we don’t have cops killing black people just
for the fuck of it.
TM: You’ve both
expressed frustration with the way things are. Is there space to work
within the system right now, or is there a need for a new approach?
CM: This is an ebb and flow. Think of the riots of ’67 that created massive change in ’68. Think of Rodney King,
when people were completely fed up with the system, so, “Okay, we go
out and rebel.” As they should. But at some point, you know, you have to
start going back to work, you have to start taking care of your family
and kids. Me personally, I think it’s a lot easier to fix this thing
that we got than to just completely start all the way over.
TM: Can you point to any reforms in Texas that have been successful?
SH: To take Austin as an
example, you’ve seen city council try to implement reforms that I think
are very positive. They have tried to scale back arrests for Class C misdemeanors [low-level offenses]. There’s been attempts to scale back the use of police for mental health calls.
But the police department has fought
tooth and nail at every stage, and often has refused to implement those
policies. So for example in Austin, they ponied up [millions] in the last budget to
install clinicians at the 911 call center to divert mental health
calls. In the last six months or so, out of 19,000 mental health calls,
they only used the clinicians for like 200 of them. The police department as an institution has basically dug in its heels and refused to implement those policies.
Similarly, quite a few cities have
authorized police to use their discretion to issue citations instead of
arresting for low-level misdemeanors. The cops simply have not done it.
We finally just saw San Marcos, the first city to pass an ordinance saying “You’re not going to have the discretion to issue citations. You will always issue citations in these circumstances.”
So, that’s the fight we’re having. When
the local government tries to do something different, tries to scale
back the worst abuses or divert the resources to different approaches,
the police departments don’t want to do it, and they have enough
institutional power to say no, we’re not going to.
CM: For me, the thing
that really makes me feel like, “Hey actually, you know, if we keep
doing this right … we could probably do something,” was our big fight
with the Austin Police Association on the union contracts. I believe to
this day, the manner in which we won [by getting a seat at the bargaining table] doesn’t usually happen at all. And freedom cities, the marijuana ordinances are signs of baby steps of progress. But then to have the chief come out and say we’re against the homeless ordinances is
also a sign of the institution not understanding that we are trying to
get somewhere better, more equitable, and equal. It’s like a
two-steps-forward, one-step-back type of thing.
TM: Are there solutions
you’d like to see specifically addressing the disproportionate amount of
violence that black people experience from the cops?
CM: I don’t know. You
can’t “courageous conversations” your way out of racism. You can’t train
your way out of being a racist asshole. But there are things we can do
that don’t empower the police department so much, so they don’t feel so
emboldened to just do whatever they want. Right now, there’s a very
serious conversation around the country about defunding police
departments. We need to divert funds from police departments and put
them to other areas within city budgets, to make sure we can provide
those services to communities and people that need them.
The police have so much money, and [public health] is so underfunded. So when COVID happened, they were running around scrambling, looking for solutions, looking for ideas, and that’s why it took so long to get testing in the most immunocompromised communities.
Defunding the police is a critical first step, but that’s definitely
not going to fix racism and people’s biases against black people.
SH: Trying to expunge racism from society is a far bigger question. I think we can scale back the violence much more easily. Deadly force
is a good example. Right now, if someone is suspected of having
committed violence, a cop can shoot them. There doesn’t have to be an
imminent threat. They don’t have to try and de-escalate in any way.
You’re authorized to shoot them. We need to change that statute. The Police Executive Research Forum, the national think tank on law enforcement, came out with resources
for de-escalation policies. In Austin they have narrowly put that on
the books. They train you to try not to use force but once you start,
you go whole hog. Well, that’s not what de-escalation is supposed to be,
according to the national best practices.
TM: Another conversation
in the public sphere right now is accountability. In the case of Mike
Ramos and George Floyd, there were videos, and in Dallas you have the
cops saying there are outsiders protesting, but they’ve mostly arrested local people
according to public records. If the police department can put out a
statement with a lot of leeway on how they frame the issue, what does
accountability look like?
CM: I think it goes back
to the power of police departments. You can show them they are doing
something explicitly wrong. But in their mind it is justified, because
this person didn’t comply or didn’t comply fast enough. That cop that
was on the neck of George Floyd, he thinks he didn’t do anything wrong.
And again, there are no checks and balances. A few years ago was the first time we saw cops getting indicted
and going to jail. This whole institution is run amok. [It is] there to
protect the system as is. That’s why they get that leeway.
SH: The answer to your question is that journalists who cover law enforcement suck. Across the board.
[Journalists] feel like they need [cops] as sources, so they defer over
and over. The police union should not be your go-to source on every
policy question. If it is not an employment issue, journalists should
not be asking the police union their opinion.
In Houston, the union is engaging in outright demagoguery on bail reform,
telling lie after lie on what is going on. That’s our biggest barrier
to change: journalists deciding to do their damn job and stop kissing
the police union’s ass and giving them undue influence would solve half
of that problem when it comes to accountability to the public. I
call that laziness but if you’re being generous, it’s the constraints
of journalism in this era. Most newsrooms have seen cuts, and there are fewer journalists covering more stuff.
So you’re going to do what’s easy: calling the police union and getting
a quote and running that. What’s hard is filing open records requests
and speaking to advocates, defense lawyers, judges, or other people who
have insight into what’s going on and getting a more nuanced view.
The other piece of accountability is
about internal disciplinary processes, and prosecutors holding
[officers] accountable. There’s tension between police unions and police
departments. The state civil service code has protections to keep
officers from being held accountable. The police unions got those
installed over the years. For example, the 180-day rule,
where [officers] can’t be disciplined after 180 days after the time
something happens. And there are rules that say officers get to view
their investigative file and body camera footage before an investigator
talks to them. Even if they are suspected of murder. Who else gets that?
Can you imagine anyone else accused of murder, saying “Before we
interrogate you, you can see everything in the file and the video and
talk to your lawyer and craft a story”? No one but cops gets that.
EDITOR'S NOTE: I used to read 'Grits for Breakfast' from time to time but got tired of reading Henson's constant bashing of the police and the comments by creeps who called the cops murderers, rapists, child sex offenders, crooks, etc.
While Henson has never said "the only good cop is a dead cop," that's clearly how his followers feel ... and he loves it.
