Cite, Release, George Floyd and Deadly Misdemeanors: what is it going to take?
So yeah, that’s me.
The black guy. Up there in the top left. Next to me is Jocabed Marquez, below me, friend and mentor Melissa Derrick and next to her, new San Marcos City Council Member, Maxfield Baker.
We have all been elected and re-elected in the past 2 years, part of a new wave of politicians rising Deep in the Heart of Texas, in the past 7 years or so. We represent change through direct action, the manifestation of the hearts and souls of the growing majority of mainstreamed, marginalized and melanated bodies and tribes of Texas rising to claim our state and our lives as our nation struggles with its Original Sin, once again.
I’m not interested in going too deeply into the details of what has happened this time around, the entire world knows already and there are legions of those addressing the ongoing violence and collective reckoning. Another Great Soul has left the planet and we are left to understand the message his passing has left with us.
George Floyd and the Litany of Black Sacrifices have sunk into the collective consciousness of white America, not that our shining souls and collective black American selves haven’t always had a place there since the beginning. Since the beginning, that is, of this nation’s cultural war against blackne-I mean, badness, because everything is dichotomized in America, is it not? Those of us who live here know her. We know how Lady Liberty simpers in her long gowns with her drawers hanging from her torch, casting a knowing wink back at her French builders then looking forward to her American rapists, knowing full well that their ethical compromises set this nation on a course way back then that had to be reconciled someday in some way.
We’re the bad guys, to some. We’re the folks who want criminals to walk the streets, according to this Wanted poster. We’re the ones that, apparently, are lawless demogogues undermining Law and Order and contributing to Lawlessness. That’s how it was framed in the image I included in this writing, apparently sanctioned by a high-ranking member of the city’s Police Association.
Obviously we are not that. We are, instead, the ones who did not want to see another day like the days that we’ve been collectively experiencing lately.
The kind of day that has been coming and that is also here. Every day these days it seems we bear witness to yet another offense against the soul and the psychological underpinnings of anyone who considers themselves to be a good human. Because not everybody does, right? Nor should they, the world requires dark and light — another dichotomy — to keep on rolling. It requires sacrifice upon the Alter of Polarity and just as it is with atoms and molecules, the fundamental forces of creation, all material manifestation arises from deep, abiding blackness into sharp, revealing white light. From the absence of all color to the presence of all possible shades and hues, so the flow of our lives mirror creation in the natural world itself.
My fellow Council Members and I have been working on Criminal Justice Reform in the city of San Marcos, 20 minutes south of Austin and 45 north of San Antonio, since August of last year. The activist organization Mano Amiga brought it to the table when it was made clear that the police here had the same problem as pretty much every law enforcement organization in the nation with the equitable distribution of justice to its entire population.
We’re not in this to “win” this, persay. We’re not trying to release all criminals. Far from it. We are in this because we are this and this is all that we can do. We are in this to find a way through this morass, a swamp 400 years in the making and, simultaneously, re-center the focus of this system so that it comes through for as many people as possible no matter how they look. We stand to speak out and act out in ways that ensure that everyone’s access to equal justice is assured.
Just like many of you are doing, wherever you are in your life right now.
While our police situation here in San Marcos has not had any high profile cases that we are now reeling from nationally, there have of course been injustices over the years and what came to light last summer was the belated statistical acknowledgement that blacks and browns didn’t receive the same consideration by law enforcement as whites. A problem we here in San Marcos decided to attack last summer.
Each and every one of you out here or in there, protesting or watching, sharing or holding it all in, weeping and raging, engaged in the tumult of direct confrontation or playing the long game of working through whatever part of the system you contact, on the daily, in your myriad and indivisible ways or being black, brown, yellow, red and white in the world, designations which are now more meaningless than they ever have been before, is a part of this change. We were born for these times and we are all on point, doing what we are supposed to be doing.
But you can do more.
I got involved with another council member now running for County Commissioner, Lisa Prewitt, when we were invited to a meeting of County Law Enforcement to discuss and update a local interpretation of the state’s 2007 Cite and Release law, allowing people who had committed certain Class C, B and A misdemeanors to be cited rather than arrested. We sat with citizens, with community lawyers and activists, with police chiefs and a magistrate judge for 8 months, hammering out a potential Resolution or Ordinance that was more or less agreeable to all parties and we passed it.
4 city council members to 3. Even the council members and most of the citizens who did not approve of the Ordinance wanted it to be a Resolution. But the majority wanted to provide guidance to officer discretion so that events like the one that just took the life of George Floyd would not happen.
According to Texas Penal Code § 32.21, possession and transfer of a Counterfeit bill is “…a Class C misdemeanor if the value of the property or service is less than $100…”.
Y’all get that?
If George had been in San Marcos and the officers of THIS city had been FOLLOWING THE LAW then he should have been released with a citation. NOT held down and KILLED over groceries.
We seek, here in San Marcos— alongside our County, Hays — to also implement a Cite and Divert program, where individuals encountering law enforcement on what may be the worst day of their lives don’t even get put in the system at all as a criminal case. Then, we seek to assay the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program as a way by which officers and counselors can assist folks in the grips of addiction of any kind, help, which they need right there on the scene of the encounter, rather than arrest, criminalization and a descent into further and more abiding despair.
A full slate of criminal justice reforms is necessary and I don’t mind if y’all take a page from what we’re doing and present it to your cities, towns and villages. Let’s do whatever it is we can do, however we can do it, to make sure that we are paying attention to Law Enforcement before these kinds of terrible events happen; before more lives are lost. Despite how it may seem sometimes, it is possible to change the system if you really try. If you elect politicians that mean it. If you hold your city’s police department accountable and make them share the numbers and, if they don’t add up to equity, make them change! Demand that they change!
Do what you have to do to make this a better world.
I didn’t get in this for fame and fortune. I stood up for my city when my peers and mentors called me to do so. I know there are many others out there right now who have been and are doing the same. Because it is our time. Our time to make the changes and be the change that we’ve wanted to bear witness to. Instead of just sitting and watching, which is life as usual for many of us, many, many of you are out there in the streets, railing against the negative externality of a predatory capitalist system that requires blood to continue its remorseless clacking into a mechanistic and transhumanistic future.
We only get one of these as the people we are. 3-score and 10 some say, then we’re out like a light, a cacaphony of “sound and fury” we are, as the old school poet Shakespeare once wrote. You gotta make it count and do it for your children and your children’s children. If you don’t have kids, do it for your sister’s kids, your friend’s kids, your neighbor down the hall’s bad-ass rug rats who have to live in this world that we have furthered in its ends and upheld in its dysfunction in our myriad and unequally culpable ways down through the centuries.
Because if we don’t do it, who will?
Those folks looking back across at you, from behind police shields and canted tear-gas containers, prepared to disturb your peace?
