What's The Point of The Uvalde Police?
40% of The City's Budget Goes to Policing, Mostly to Support Salary and Benefits
In this streamlined, graph-heavy edition of the newsletter, I’m looking at the City of Uvalde’s budget, as a broader lens by which to think about the breach of duty displayed on scene of the school shooting as well as the ongoing breach as the department tries to shirk accountability.
Let me begin with recap of the facts as they currently stand: (Teen Vogue has a good collection of links to all the relevant new stories from Wapo, NYT, AP, etc. For the most recent stuff, here’s also this Yahoo article.)
The police initially told us the school shooter had body armor. That was a lie. They also told us a teacher propped open a door to outside, which was also a lie. In addition to outright lies, the police have changed their story around 12 times, so it’ll take some time before we can establish the full timeline and official account.
The police received the call at 11:30 and were on scene soon after. In fact, Border Patrol and ICE were reportedly on scene as early as 12pm, but were told not to enter the school by the police on scene. BP would later defy police orders, enter the school and kill the shooter around 1pm - at least an hour after law enforcement had arrived.
Parents were prevented by police from entering the school, and at least one mother was momentarily cuffed when she attempted to enter. She was later able to enter the building and rescue her two children - and was subsequently threatened by the police department in an effort to prevent her from talking to the media. (Link here.)
The city police department and school district department are now reportedly not cooperating with Texas’ Department of Public Safety investigation of the response. (Link here.)
In The Atlantic, Liz Bruenig rightfully castigates the Uvalde police for their cowardice, writing that “a platoon of armed and trained men who had evidently come to rely so heavily on guns and armor in lieu of courage and strength that they found themselves bereft of the latter when outdone in the former.” But even scalding indictment seems generous given the fact that these cowards sought to keep BP and ICE from intervening in the situation too. Surely, lack of sound judgment must be added to the list of vices here, and perhaps apathy or worse as well.
In the aftermath of this breakdown in response, many have been quick to note that 40% of the city’s revenue goes toward supporting its police department. This may seem like an astronomical amount to those not acquainted with municipal budgets, but as illustrated by analysis in Bloomberg, it’s a pretty standard allocation:
The city’s most recent budget covers the period of October 1, 2021 – September 30, 2022. In this current budget, the city estimates that it will raise $11million and change in revenue, spend $11million in change on expenditures, resulting in a balanced budget and an $8k surplus. I skimmed through some previous financial documents (including some audits) and my general sense is that the city is in good fiscal shape over the last decade.
Of the $11milllion expected expenditures for this year, $4million is budgeted for policing, as shown below.
Of that $4million, $3.6million goes toward salary, wages, and benefits.
The department has 57 employees (the vast majority of which are uniformed officers) - meaning the average compensation package is right around $64k per year. But we can assume that positions like “records clerk” and “administrative assistant” receive substantially less, and positions like “chief of police” and “police lieutenant” receive substantially more. And we can also assume that these numbers do not even come close to capturing the potential earning trajectory for any given officer as regards promotion, tenure, and future pension earnings. But a compensation package around $64k per year for an individual officer is still higher than the median household income in the city which is $41k per the latest Census data.
Budgets are value statements. Allocated dollars reveal priorities more than empty words, and the allocation of those dollars is itself an exercise in power given that resources enable action. But sometimes budgets contain explicit value statements in the form of words too. Here’s the mission statement for the police department, per the current budget:
The Uvalde Police Department seeks to improve the quality of life for all citizens of the City of Uvalde through responsible and ethical policing. Members of the Uvalde Police Department shall provide police service of the highest quality by being honest, truthful, unbiased, professional and involved with the entire community.
Whatever else the department may or may not have done so far this year, it’s hard to imagine that allowing an active shooter to spend an hour in a school killing 19 elementary-age children is aligned with this statement. It’s even harder to imagine that Uvalde residents - 1 in 5 of whom live in poverty - are receiving the quality of service from the department that they are paying for.
And it’s worth being explicit about how Uvalde residents are paying for these subpar officers. Of the $6.8million in tax revenue (the other main revenue sources are intergovernmental transfers and service fees), a little over half, $3.2million, are generated through sales tax.
Unlike property tax (which accounts for $2.8million), sales tax is regressive which means that the less income you have, the higher the share of your income is eaten up by that tax when you buy taxed goods. Put differently, the poorest households in the city are the most burdened in paying a tax that is then used to pay officers who most likely make more (sometimes substantially more) than 50% of the people living in the city. These impoverished households are paying the salaries of officers who are seemingly unwilling to risk their personal wellbeing to save children but who are all too willing to lie about it to protect their reputations and jobs after the fact.
Why should residents be paying for the salaries of these cowardly officers?
Why should grieving mothers subsidize the retirement packages of these officers?
What is the point of the Uvalde police department?
And of course, when you start asking yourself these questions, when you start digging into the value statement that is city budgets, comparing the numbers against nationwide and localized patterns of dereliction, negligence, brutality, corruption…
This is not to say that “defund the police” is the answer everywhere and always. But I do think the burden is on the police departments in every municipality to justify their existence, to justify the amount of money that we routinely spend on them. And if I was a councilmember in Uvalde, there’s no way I’d be greenlighting spending increases for FY 2022-2023, and I’d be forcing the chief of police (right now, in my office) to convince me why I shouldn’t seek to introduce budget cuts.