Reimagining History at the Austin Police Academy

For the past year, Austin has deployed a group of community folks and city staff to analyze the curriculum at the police academy and suggest reforms: It's not going well.

The community reviews material, makes recommendations, but little gets implemented. It seems at this point like the goal is to stall until interest dies down and no one notices that nothing ever got changed.

A case in point is a section on constitutional history that Grits wrote about last year. It turned out, the instructor largely based the curriculum on a book by a John Birch Society propagandist who authored a nutball history called "The 5,000 Year Leap" which was popularized after his death by right-wing broadcaster Glen Beck.

This text makes a variety of unusual claims, pretending the Founding Fathers intended to create a Bible-based government (no "separation of church and state" here) and that the Jamestown settlement represented the birth of free markets and private enterprise. Jamestown, of course, was a company town, the company was owned by a king, and the economy was built on slavery and indentured servitude. But the author, Cleon Skousen, was never one to let facts get in the way of a good, neo-fascist narrative.

My wife is on the review committee and she asked your correspondent to assess this section when it first came up in 2021. Grits quickly discovered that some of the weird, faux history came from the Skousen book, including various jingoistic graphics that I located via a Google Image search.

Grits purchased a copy of  "The 5,000 Year Leap" and it's a piece of work. Much of it was just strange, fundamentalist rambling and little of it is relevant to policing. Skousen concocted 28 "principles" he claimed the Founding Fathers adhered to, but they're his creation, and more a reflection of the views of the hard-right edge of modern religious conservatives than any consensus held by the founders.

The latest version of the Austin police academy training eliminated much of the most explicit, ideological aspects from the book but kept the focus on pre-Constitutional history Skousen promoted, leaving the new version an odd and decontextualized shell of its former self.

The city staffer assigned to lead the review, Anne Kringen, pulled this course from the committee's review list last year, saying they wanted to make changes and come back with a better version. But before the review could occur, the same instructor taught this similar but stripped down version to cadets. 

Cadets were once again taught obscure details about colonial history, starting with the birth of free markets in Jamestown and emphasizing selected aspects of the Articles of Confederation and the Connecticut Compromise, but not the aspects you might expect. The lesson plan and power point contained no mention of slavery, the 3/5ths Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, gender-and-property-requirements for voting, or any discussion of the interests of southern slave owners which dominated that document's formulation. 

Just before the curriculum was taught this summer, they asked a UT law prof, Andrea Marsh, to assist. She was called in at the last minute and not in any way involved in developing the history section taught to cadets. Andrea taught the final part of the constitution section, which is quite straightforward, accurate, and easily the only useful or valid part of any training cadets received on this topic. 

Kringen did not inform Andrea why she was brought in, did not tell her about concerns with the John-Birch-Society-themed historiography, and never mentioned Cleon Skousen or "The 5,000 Year Leap." Andrea told my wife she found the history "weird" and didn't understand why it was being taught to cadets.

When Kringen was asked why this was still going on, her response bordered on gaslighting. She claimed Andrea had performed an "evaluation" of the APD instructor's teaching, which was patently false. Andrea sat in on the class the day he taught, but had no input into the content and did not perform any kind of "evaluation." Moreover, because she wasn't told about the concerns with sourcing or the Bircher orientation of the instruction material, she had no context to understand what she was hearing, though she certainly could tell it had little to do with policing.

Kringen told the group it was "unfair to disregard Andrea’s evaluation and my decision to get her perspective and share it with the committee by characterizing it as being an attempt to validate anything." But again, Andrea made no "evaluation." She just sat through a "weird" lecture that seemed irrelevant and inappropriate to teach to cadets.

Kringen tacitly acknowledged this, saying Andrea thought, "some of the time spent on history could be better utilized. Her suggestion to improve the class would be to reduce the time spent on pre-Constitutional history and focus more on the [state-licensing-agency-required] bullet points." Of course, getting rid of the "weird" history rooted in Bircher ideology and focusing on actual police training was what the committee asked for a year ago. But that was not done.

Kringen still insists the same instructor should continue to teach the class and, in practice, completely defers to instructors as to what changes should be made to the curriculum. At this point, it's fair to say nothing substantive can or will change as long as that's the process.

I don't know Kringen so Grits cannot say whether this is an example of overt bad faith on her part or if she is simply disempowered in the process and police-department brass won't let her fix what's wrong. But it doesn't really matter which it is, the results are the same.

If the curriculum review can't get this fixed, it's hard to imagine anything will change regarding police training in Austin.

Clearly, that's exactly how the Austin PD brass wants it.

#CJreform Movement Poorly Positioned to Confront Re-Criminalized Abortion

During my three decades working on criminal-justice reform, when abortion came up, your correspondent always took the attitude, "That's someone else's job." Not anymore. As of last week, abortion became a criminal-justice issue in Texas, full stop.

The US Supreme Court's abandonment of Roe vs. Wade -- combined with a decision last year by Greg Abbott and the Texas Legislature to re-affirm criminal statutes on abortion from the 1925 Penal Code, if and when Roe ever fell --  suddenly have dumped the abortion question back into the realm of criminal law. 

SCOTUS decided Roe v. Wade when I was four years old, so I've never known a world in which the criminal courts managed women's reproductive choices. Thus it's easy to forget that the Wade in Roe v. Wade was Henry Wade, the Dallas County District Attorney,* and that for a century-plus before that, both obtaining and assisting with an abortion were crimes for which people were arrested by police, charged by prosecutors, sentenced by juries, and imprisoned in the same facilities as murderers and thieves.

Statutes banning assisted or intentional miscarriages were on the books in Texas from at least 1854, before being updated to include the word "abortion" in 1907 and then codified into the Penal Code in 1925. Attorney Doug Gladden goes through that statutory history here. 

Gladden identified 40 abortion convictions in Texas appellate records: 24 before 1925, 16 of which were reversed, and 16 from 1925 to 1971, of which five were reversed. Some cases may not have been appealed, and records may not be complete, but even so, this tells us abortion statutes weren't frequently enforced. 

What they did do was prevent most legitimate, trained doctors from performing them. In Greenville, for example, in 1905, a black doctor was arrested for performing an abortion on an 18-year old girl. In 1907, a physician was prosecuted in Haskell, TX, for performing an abortion on his 13-year old sister-in-law, who had been raped. In El Paso,  Dr. Andrea Reum, whose husband was also a medical doctor, was prosecuted after performing an abortion on a young black woman. She was a rich society lady who wore fashionable gowns and diamonds while incarcerated in the county jail. 

The earliest case I found reported in Texas newspapers was n 1890 in Comanche, when a medical doctor was arrested for performing an abortion. Charges were later dismissed when the victim refused to testify.

Such episodes were widely publicized in the press and sent a message to physicians that performing abortions would cost them their licenses. In 1919, the Legislature passed HB 235 making that official, requiring license cancellation by the state medical board for any physician found to have given a criminal abortion.

The Amarillo Globe News in 1960 cited local physicians' concerns that the abortion ban forced women to have "do it yourself" abortions, and reported that most women seeking the procedure were married.

Forbidding safe abortions didn't mean women wouldn't pursue unsafe ones, en masse. By the time of Roe v. Wade, the practice had become widespread. According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in 1966 an estimated one million women had criminal abortions, and 8,000 of them died as a result.

By contrast, in 2021, the Guttmacher Institute estimates about 930,000 women had safe, medical abortions, though the US population is much larger than in 1966. So legalizing abortion empirically didn't make their number increase; it only made things safer and less threatening for women and the nurses and physicians brave enough to help them.

If it's true that abortions were more prevalent under a criminal sanctions regime, from a policy perspective, re-criminalizing greatly increases the harm without achieving the desired result.

The other big intersection of criminal law and abortion rights in the wake of the Dobbs opinion arises for women under supervision of the justice system: Either out on bail or on probation or parole. Whether these women will be allowed to leave their jurisdiction to get an abortion will be decided on a judge-by-judge basis: Some will routinely allow it; some never will. This will create a patchwork of policies as well as massive incentive for defendants to lie to the courts and abscond.

Presently, because this hasn't been an issue the criminal-justice system dealt with in more than a half century, there's no criminal-justice reform group obviously well-situated to confront these questions. The ACLU will step up, one assumes, but they're being pulled in a million directions and don't have a winning track record on these topics. Meanwhile, abortion-rights groups who one would anticipate would be most aggressive haven't dealt with the justice system in a half century and will have a steep learning curve. Grits fears that neither the abortion rights movement nor the #cjreform movement are well-positioned to confront what's coming next.

MORE: A slightly expanded/edited version of this post was published in The Texas Observer.

* An earlier version of this blog post said Henry Wade was Harris County DA. He was DA in Dallas County. I regret the error.