This is a clear path forward.
Chas Moore watched in shock one night in 2017 as Austin City Council voted on the city’s proposed police contract.
He and other criminal justice reformers had spent months observing contract negotiations and lobbying council members to reject a deal they said was too expensive and lacked crucial accountability measures.
The city’s 10 council members and mayor raised their hands to vote the deal down.
“I don’t think anyone thought that would happen,” said Moore, president of the Austin Justice Coalition. “Historically people fight police unions — and they do not win.”
The vote sent police back to the negotiating table, and the resulting contract included a slew of reforms — at half the cost of the previous version.
In Houston, that negotiating table is behind closed doors.
Activists here want to change that as the city and the police union negotiate a new contract this year. They are again seeking the right to observe deliberations and to try to change provisions they say protect officers accused of wrongdoing. But while other cities with similar bargaining rules allow residents to observe negotiations, Houston does not, aided by what critics say are gaps in the state’s government code that do not clearly require union contract negotiations to be open to the public.
Houston’s police budget in 2020 tallied about $911 million — by far the largest allocation in the city budget’s general fund. While other cities across the U.S. slashed police budgets, Houston’s City Council unanimously in June passed a budget with a $20 million increase for the police department.
The pressure for reform rose around the country in the wake of the killing of former Houston resident George Floyd in police custody, and organizers say it’s overdue here.
Not long after that Austin contract rejection, community organizers in Houston sought to observe police contract deliberations here.
Local criminal justice advocate Tarsha Jackson said she approached City Hall in 2018 to try to share community concerns — but the criminal justice reformer with the Texas Organizing Project said she found an opaque process.
“It was not public. It was like a guessing game,” Jackson said.
The contract was settled behind closed doors without them getting a chance to see it or offer their input.
“As we’re having these conversations around police accountability and reform, how can we have these conversations without the community?” Moore asked regarding the efforts around the country to get a seat at the table during contract negotiations.
We all recognize that a big piece of police reform must be done via the collective bargaining process. Given that, and given the action items that the reformers are seeking, they need a seat at the table or those items will not be addressed. The Lege can and should address some items as well, but they already have a lot on their plate, and it’s never a good idea to depend on a particular bill making it through the Lege, because so many things can happen to knock it off course. This is something we can do now, because the new CBA is coming up soon.
Houston Police Officers do not have collective bargaining and are not able to use it. They use Meet and Confer. There is a difference. If you want this, go to the City Council meetings.