D Magazine
By Bethany Erickson
A new study compared criminal justice spending in the country’s largest cities to what they spend on community services like affordable housing, parks and recreation, and mental health programs. Its findings are not particularly surprising: police and public safety remain the largest spend in municipal and county budgets, often dwarfing all other community services.
That study, conducted by the Social Movement Support Lab, analyzed the country’s 20 largest cities and found that they (along with their counties) spent almost $38 billion in policing, prosecution, and jailing in 2022. That was often as much as 11 times more than what they spent on public investments in community resources like housing, parks, and infrastructure.
As first reported by the Texas Observer, the state’s five largest cities—Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, and Fort Worth—were included in that study.
The Lab’s report uses what it calls a Criminalization/Care Ratio, which was calculated by dividing the local investment into the criminal justice system by investments into what it calls Systems of Community Care. A ratio of 1.0 would mean that the investments into the two budget segments are equally divided. A ratio of 2.0 would mean that a city is spending twice what it does for policing as it does in community services. A score of 0.5 would mean that it was spending more on community resources than the criminal justice system.
For the study’s purposes, a criminalization system includes all aspects that address crime, from policing, prosecuting, courts, jails, and probation. Systems of community care includes services devoted to mental, behavioral, and community health; wraparound supports for youth and families; affordable housing; parks and recreation, arts and culture; and community-based alternatives to incarceration and criminalization.
Of the five cities, Fort Worth had the highest ratio of criminalization versus care at 6.8, spending $1,289 per household on its public safety budget versus $205 for community care systems. Dallas had a score of 3.0, spending $1,204 per household on crime versus $396 for community resources. Houston had a score of 4.8, San Antonio 1.6, and Austin 1.2.
Courtesy Social Movement Support Lab
In Dallas last year, there were 4,507 people employed in departments devoted to criminal justice, and 621 in departments that address community resources. Fort Worth has 2,375 in the former and 621 in the latter. Of the five cities, Austin comes the closest to a 1:1 ratio with 2,697 employed in criminal justice departments and 1,530 in community care departments.
The topic of how to spend public dollars became a national talking point after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, although activists had been advocating for adjustments in spending for years.
Nearly three years ago, 10 of 14 Dallas city council members asked City Manager T.C. Broadnax to consider 2021 budget options that would give money from the public safety budget to community programs that address underlying issues—community services, as termed by the study.
By the time the budget passed, the largest line item cut for public safety was $7 million from the police overtime spend, leaving the department’s budget at more than $500 million—an increase over the previous year, and the highest of all city departments. When the 2022 budget was passed in September 2021, public safety got a little over $565 million, which included money to hire 250 new officers last year and 275 this year. (Council also restored the overtime cuts.)
The City Council passed a $4.5 billion municipal budget for 2023 that includes $612 million for the Dallas Police Department, which includes funding for another 250 officers and more than $4 million in incentives to help retain officers.
The general fund also included money to improve the city’s tree canopy, investments in environmental justice and remediation of contaminated areas, a $2.5 million homeless action response team, and expanded hours of nine of the city’s public library branches from 40 to 54 hours a week. An extra $20 million in sales tax revenue is also earmarked for projects and programs that address the findings of the city’s recently-adopted racial equity plan.
That money could potentially pay for parks, more equity-specific public art, measures designed to improve communications between the city and the community by appointing ambassadors, implementing more environmental rehabilitation programs, installing community air quality monitoring, launching homebuyer assistance and anti-displacement funds, and offering rental subsidies.
But Texas cities and counties are hamstrung when it comes to budgeting for law enforcement. After calls to “defund the police” during the George Floyd protests, Gov. Greg Abbott signed House Bill 1900 into law in 2021. That law makes it nearly impossible for a large city to reduce its law enforcement budget without taking a financial hit from state coffers. The state can deduct money from its sales tax receipts and prevent the city from increasing property taxes or utility fees.
To reduce a city law enforcement budget, the law says, the city must also reduce spending across the municipal departments. It also means that the city must maintain or increase public safety spending each budget cycle. So, should the city have a bad revenue year or two, it cannot make cuts to the police budget without also making similar cuts to other city services. The more frequently the city increases the budget for public safety, the more likely the city will have to cut funding elsewhere to avoid a shortfall. In the past, community services are often the first to meet the knife.
Senate Bill 25, also signed by Abbott in 2021, prevents large counties from reducing or reallocating their law enforcement budgets without presenting it to the voters. If a reduction happens without voter approval, the state can freeze that city’s property tax revenue.
That law makes it nearly impossible for a large city to reduce its law enforcement budget without taking a financial hit from state coffers.
Bear in mind, for many, “defunding the police” was really a push for cities to reallocate some of their ever-ballooning police budgets to resources that have been shown to reduce the things that lead to crime: empowering neighborhoods by providing affordable housing and infrastructure that allows those communities to gather, forge connections, and form support systems.
In 2019, a group of activists urged the Dallas City Council to not take money from other departments to recruit more police officers.
“We think we should be having an anti-poverty budget, not a public safety budget,” Sara Mokuria, one of the group’s organizers, said at the time. “And truly, an anti-poverty budget is a public safety budget. When you invest in the people, you don’t have to police them.”
The Lab’s study points out that Dallas has made some moves to improve community alternatives to police interventions. The Office of Integrated Public Safety is cited as an example of the city’s recent investment in alternative options.
This includes the RIGHT Care program, a collaboration between the Parkland Health and Hospital System, Dallas Fire Rescue, and the Dallas Police Department that teams police officers with social workers, paramedics, and off-site mental health experts who respond to 911-reported mental health emergencies. However, the money to fund the Office of Integrated Public Safety comes from a separate line item in the general fund, and, at $5 million total, was about 100 times less than the money given to the Dallas Police Department.
Meantime, Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia told WFAA this week that violent crime had dropped for the second consecutive year. “Over the last two years, we have 1,700 less victims of violent crime,” he told the station. The last two years included the implementation of a new crime plan that focused on non-police interventions, like blight remediation, infrastructure investments, and the increased use of social workers. It also cut the city into hundreds of tiny grids, about the size of two football fields, that targeted various interventions that both involved and did not involve police.
There is still plenty of work to be done to address historic disinvestment. A study by SMU civil engineering students found that the lack of community gathering places are just a piece of the infrastructure inequities in the city. It identified 62 infrastructure deserts that include deficiencies in parks, sidewalks, roads, and lighting. Most of those 62 are located in majority Black and Latino communities.
“We have these spaces that are safe and nice where people gather, and community is a really important piece of the fabric for resilience and for people to be able to function,” SMU professor Dr. Barbara Minsker, who heads the study, said last year. “If they can’t thrive, then we’re going to be paying to support them one way or another. So we might as well support them in a way that supports the fabric of the community.”
Fort Worth City Councilman Chris Nettles said that cities often equate big police budgets with supporting the police. “The issue is, when we don’t fund parks … when we don’t fund our school programs greater than the police, we’re setting ourselves up for failure.”
Thanks to the Legislature, cities will have to get creative to find the money for more community-based investments.
Bethany Erickson - Bethany Erickson is the senior digital editor for D Magazine. She's written about real estate, education policy, the stock market, and crime throughout her career, and sometimes all at the same time. She hates lima beans and 5 a.m. and takes SAT practice tests for fun.