In the heat of last summer’s uprisings over the killing of George Floyd, a small group of San Antonians, with little experience in criminal justice reform, hatched a plan to turn protest into policy. They looked at their city, where police officers fired for misconduct routinely wind up back on the force, where civilian oversight is toothless, and where tortuous contract negotiations five years ago concluded without serious reforms. And they looked at the local police union, notorious for its bare knuckle political attacks on any city leader who crossed them. The problem, the activists decided, was that the union had turned its contract into a shield against officer accountability, and politicians were too afraid to pierce it.
Calling themselves Fix SAPD, the group began gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would revoke the San Antonio police union’s ability to collectively bargain, the mechanism that allows the union to negotiate directly with the city over everything from wages to firing protocols, and reach legally binding contracts. Nationwide, workers in the private sector generally have a right to collective bargaining, a crowning achievement of the labor movement dating back to the New Deal-era, but the situation varies by state for public employees. In Texas, state law gives police and firefighters—and no other public workers—access to collective bargaining, but local voters can bestow and revoke the right. San Antonians granted their cops bargaining in 1974; now they’ll get the chance to reverse that decision.
In January, Fix SAPD submitted the 20,000 signatures necessary to get their initiative, now called Proposition B, on the May 1 ballot. If successful, San Antonio would become the first major Texas city to revoke collective bargaining for police. Doing so, Fix SAPD says, is essential to empowering civilians and holding bad officers accountable.
