Community Town Hall | Re-Imagining Our Future

In August 2020, the Austin City Council unanimously voted to cut the police department budget by $150 million!

The Austin Area Urban League has partnered with the City of Austin to provide a platform for the voices unheard. What does our community look like RE-imagined? We want to know your story! We want to hear your voice! Together let’s create impactful change in the communities we are apart of.

Local officers and the city’s top cop faced months of criticism over the killing of an unarmed Black and Hispanic man, the use of force against anti-police brutality protesters and the investigation of a demonstrator’s fatal shooting by another citizen.

Those criticisms coincided with protests across Texas and the country calling for reforms on police tactics and the “defunding” of law enforcement in favor of redistributing funds to social services and alternative public safety programs. Austin was the first of Texas’ four biggest cities to drastically cut police department funding. The share of the police department budget that was cut is among the largest percentage decreases in the nation this year.

The immediate cuts included eliminating funding from three planned police cadet classes and reallocating funds to areas like violence prevention, homelessness prevention, mental health services, food access, and abortion access programs. Following the Council vote, the City Manager was tasked with building and leading a community engagement process to assess the cuts and programs for funding.

For additional information, please use the WeFund tool created by our friends at the Austin Justice Coalition, Just Liberty, Texas Appleseed, and Texas Fair Defense Project. The leaders of these organizations have created a WeFund portal, which includes information about budgeting and how Austin residents can be engaged with the City of Austin to reimagine justice.