Cap Metro's police force

Happy Juneteenth! City Council first established Juneteenth as a city holiday in 2020.

Clarification: Last week I suggested that Cap Metro's payment issues last year may have prevented a complete tally of the transit ridership. However, CEO Dottie Watkins tells me that is not the case:

"(E)ven if no one ever paid a fare we'd still know how many people boarded. High level - we use Automatic Passenger Counters (APCs) to count people, basically infrared sensors in the top of the door frame 'looking' down on the comings and goings."

Good to know!

Cap Metro police force launches: The news out of Cap Metro is that the chief of its nascent police force is leaving a day after Austin's first dedicated transit cops were deployed. As far as I know, there is nothing particularly noteworthy about Chief Eric Robins departure; he is returning to the Houston area to oversee a school district police force.

But it will be interesting to see what happens with Cap Metro's cops. Crime or the perception of crime has become a major problem for transit systems around the country, most notably in New York, where political leaders have made a big point of increasing police presence in subways to try to make people feel safer.

Transit feels even less safe when there is low ridership, because often that means that a large percentage of those who are on the bus or hanging out at bus stops are visibly homeless, mentally ill or inebriated. It's the same issue on some of Austin's not-very-walkable streets. Because there are so few pedestrians, that one strung out guy muttering to himself feels a lot more menacing than he would on a bustling city street.

When Cap Metro first started talking about a police force, there was the typical pushback from progressive activists who argued in favor of social workers over cops. There's no question that the ultimate solution to many of the common public safety issues on/around Cap Metro infrastructure is social services (housing/treatment etc). But speaking of social services, one of the best things to do for poor and working class Austinites is to provide them a reliable and safe public transit system, one they don't merely endure but enjoy. And sometimes the people causing problems on a bus don't need to merely be engaged –– they need to be removed.

That doesn't mean this effort is guaranteed to succeed. Hopefully there are some metrics by which they will assess the performance of the new transit police force. It will be interesting to see if bus operators, who were big backers of the new police force, report feeling safer in the coming months and years.

The challenge ahead for Paige Ellis: In order to get around term limits and run for a third term, Council Member Paige Ellis will be have to collect roughly 3,400 signatures among voters in her Southwest Austin district. To get a sense of the slog ahead, I reached out to former Council Member Kathie Tovo, the only one who has done it before.