LIVE BLOG: Austin Public Safety Committee discussing police tactics and orders
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Austin’s newly-formed Public Safety Committee will be meeting to discuss Austin Police General orders and police tactics Thursday at 2 p.m. The committee is a subgroup within Austin City Council, designed to follow through on a host of police reform and racial justice measures the council approved in June.
The meeting started shortly after 2 p.m. and can be viewed live here.
Council Member Jimmy Flannigan chairs the committee and spoke with KXAN News this morning about what he expects to see at the meeting.
On the Austin City Council Message Board, Flannigan posted that panelists will include members of the Austin Police Department including Sergeant Mike Crumrine, Officer Anna Jackson, Corporal Marcos Johnson, and Officer Thomas Villareal. Other panelists will include Rahki Agrawal of MEASURE, Jennifer Laurin who is the Wright C. Morrow Professor of Law at the UT School of Law, Adriana Pinon of ACLU of Texas, and Carl Webb who is a community member as well as a U.S. Military veteran.
Flannigan said on the message board that this will be the first workshop in a series “created to tackle the challenges of redefining policing in our community.” The next workshop, he noted, will happen on July 9 at 2 p.m.
Live Blog
2:15 p.m.
The first item the committee is discussing is the APD deployment of tear gas. The resolution council passed on June 11 aimed to completely ban tear gas use by Austin police.
APD Sergeant Mike Crumrine spoke about the use of tear gas by Austin Police. Crumrine explained that “all of us have been exposed in it, all of us have been trained in how to use it or when to use it.”
He said that occasions when APD may use tear gas include the need to clear a large area. Crumrine gave the example during recent Austin protests where demonstrators got onto I-35 blocking the freeway. He said, in that situation, police did not want to have I-35 shut down because its an important artery for the city and the region.
“We could physically try to remove people, that takes a bunch, quite a bit more resources than we have available to us,” he said. Crumnrine added that before APD officers deploy tear gas, they give a number of warnings that it is going to be deployed in the hopes that people will comply before tear gas is used by officers.
“The long term side effects of being exposed to CS gas is pretty minimal,” Crumnine said.
However, community members present on the panel pushed back on Crumrine on this idea, suggesting that CS gas can cause harm particularly during a pandemic with a virus that targets the respiratory system.
“If we’re now as a community saying these are not the tactics we like, what are the other options before us?” Flannigan asked the panelists. Flannigan suggested to Crumrine that the dynamic is different at protests where demonstrators are specifically protesting police.
2:06 p.m.
Meeting called to order. Council Member Flannigan explains that the sole focus of this meeting is to address the council’s Item 95 passed on June 11 which called for specific changes to Austin Police tactics and general orders. Flannigan said the focus of the meeting will be on what appropriate tactics are moving forward. 4 Austin Police Officers and 4 community members joined in for the meeting.
Public Safety Committee
The Public Safety Committee is a relatively newly-formed group for city council. It formed out of the Judiciary Committee. Last month, members discussed possibilities for reform that included how the Austin Police Department responded to protests, allocating next year’s public safety budget and the future of APD cadet classes.
Flannigan said before the committee was created, members of city council were not having regular, public and formal conversations with the police chief, city manager and others.
KXAN’s Alyssa Goard will be providing updates from this meeting below: