The Fight to Redefine Safety in Texas

Abstract

The Fight to Redefine Safety in Texas Laur Lewis Neal (bio) Since law enforcement's inception, its maintenance of public safety has been shaped by gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. These factors determine how an officer approaches your doorstep, how you are interrogated, how your cases are investigated or prosecuted, whether your evidence is tested, and ultimately whether violence done to you is deemed violence. In Texas, as in many states, sexual assault and its mostly female victims have largely been ignored despite the crime's ubiquity. A 2015 study found that over 33 percent of adult Texans have been sexually assaulted, and 65 percent of those survivors were sexually assaulted again. Trust in law enforcement is so eroded that less than 10 percent of survivors report their attacks. Part of this has to do with a familiar "boys will be boys" culture that stigmatizes survivors, but low reporting rates also point to a consistent failure to solve and prosecute cases. In 2011, the state Department of Public Safety uncovered a backlog of 20,000 rape kits in Texas—the worst in the nation. Despite these abysmal safety statistics, police have insisted that as long as they wield a massive departmental budget, all Texans will be safe. Even the progressive state capital of Austin has a "long-standing culture of not asking too many questions about a police department," says Austin City Council Member Gregorio Casar, "though it's usually the biggest part of a city's budget." Yet recently, local politicians have been working to expand the umbrella of safety to groups of people law enforcement has always left out in the rain. Austin City Council is conducting a thorough evaluation of how the city's police department handles sexual assault investigations, with an eye to amending practices for the better. The review is not a surface measure, either; survivors' advocate Kristen Lenau calls it "groundbreaking in its expansiveness." Last year, the city council also voted to restructure the police budget, after an Austin police officer unloaded three rounds at Mike Ramos, an unarmed Black and Latino man, just a month before Minneapolis police [End Page 163] Click for larger view View full resolution We Believe ATX celebrates a city council motion passed in favor of sexual assault survivors. (Courtesy of Survivor Justice Project) officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. One-third of the police's budget will shift to medical and mental health responders and to community programs that aid victims, people struggling with addiction, and the unhoused. In response, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Republican state lawmakers have threatened to take over Austin Police Department (APD), and the state senate recently passed retaliatory bills that chisel away at tax revenue and require voter approval for city budgets that reduce or reallocate police funding. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said the bill was passed "to be sure there's not another Austin," and his fellow Republicans have justified this meddling in local politics by charging Austin with dereliction in guarding public safety. Progressives in Austin, however, are claiming that Texas was already failing in that duty—specifically, to ensure the safety of women and people of color. Survivors' advocates have been working to reform the city's handling of sexual assault for decades, but until recently they did not have the vigorous support of elected officials. Over the past five years, survivors and their advocates have brought this about by making the wide gaps in law enforcement increasingly visible. They are pushing politicians and voters to acknowledge the painful experiences of the vast number of Texas women left outside the city's umbrella of safety. [End Page 164] ________ Austin police kept thousands of untested rape kits lying in neat little rows. This visceral image reproduced in the press in 2016 and 2017 signaled to Austinites the deep failures of APD's forensic lab. "Every single one of those boxes represents a person—and that person's story and their trauma, and parts of their body—and it's incredibly intimate," says Lenau. "I don't think you can even really articulate all of the emotions and all of the history symbolized by talking about a rape kit...