Crime has been plummeting nationwide. It hasn't fallen here because of the CCPD. All that has gotten us is hundreds of millions of dollars thrown into the prison-industrial complex which is always happy to spend more money. Consider, this year they are getting $70 million that they don't even have to produce a budget for. They are spending this tax money on all sorts of things that the CCPD was never supposed to fund. And it'll get renewed this year with zero discussion and another rubber stamp.
The thing is, we could sunset the CCPD over a ten year period and not reduce police funding at all, by rolling the difference into the rapidly growing general fund (where it should have been all along.)
That's not such a bad idea. Seem a fair "compromise." A 5 or 10yr sunset period.
(I'll apologize in advance if needed for the following is a slight detour, but I'd argue still relevant as the spending is probably CCPD funds)
I ran across this story last year, http://www.citylab.c...rtments/512543/
Three times I wrote the city and mayor asking about this and never received a reply. My email was as follows:
"$765,918 between 2012 and 2016. That’s how much money the Fort Worth Police Department has supposedly spend on tools which can be used to spy on cellphones. Not only does this prompt questions about why, but also the sheer amount of money being spend seems to raise concerns as well. This is 158% the total of Chicago, the second highest city and a city with a population of approximately 2.7million people. This compared to Fort Worth’s estimated population just shy of 800,000 people. Beyond questions that can surround the possible “appropriateness” of these tools, the disproportionate amount being spend seems worth questioning as well. These numbers seem very high for a city of our size.
It has been shown that these types of surveillance tools are traditionally disproportionately deployed into minority communities. At a time where our city is currently looking to improve these relations (in light of the December incident in the 7400 block of Rock Garden involving officer William Martin) it is certainly concerning to learn of these tools acquisition over the last 4 years by our police and certainly raises questions as to where and how they are deployed.
Many of these tools are easy to abuse as well, with the potential to allow police to crack open locked devices and collect vast amounts of phone data, such as call logs, emails, social media messages, time-stamped past location data, and even deleted texts and photos—without any assistance from cellphone companies.
What oversight protections are in place to prevent the abuse of these tools and ensure due process rights remain honored?
How long does the Fort Worth police department retain any information intercepted or extracted?
Thank you for taking the time to read this email and in putting together a reply."