Police Chief Brian Manley seems determined to pick a fight with the mayor and city council. It wasn’t long ago that he openly criticized them over their repeal of ordinances governing public camping and aggressive panhandling.
Now he’s saying that his officers will continue to ticket or arrest for possession of marijuana, despite a City Council resolution passed this past week de facto legalizing the drug. Manley asserted, “A City Council does not have the authority to tell a police department not to enforce a state law.”
The chief is technically correct, the city can’t overturn a state statute, but the tickets that his officers issue will be unenforceable, and anyone arrested will need to be quickly released, because the city council barred city resources from being used to test for THC concentration, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.
That makes it difficult to prove that a substance is marijuana and not hemp, which the state legalized last year. Prior to that change, the distinction was irrelevant and the testing equipment wasn’t necessary for prosecutions. (The City Council is still authorizing payments for testing for investigation of “high priority felony-level trafficking offenses”).
Manley’s outspokenness seems driven by concern that lawlessness and a “sense of disorder” is picking up in the city, driven in part by the drug trade (“the fact is we know that there is violence involved in the illegal drug trade”) and new policies that are friendlier to the homeless and transients (“we’ve had a lot change in our community over the past eight months and officers are working diligently to address… the sense of disorder”).
Manley’s attitude contrasts with that of Mayor Adler, who views the repeal of sit/lie ordinances as necessary and humane, and who has emphasized that now the homeless themselves actually are safer because they’ve come out of backwoods areas into the open where they can more easily access services.
So this big difference of views begs the question… If a police chief and mayor go head-to-head, who wins? And what makes Manley so willing to defy the mayor and council?
Well, one reason could be that the chief is more afraid of losing control of the streets than he is of losing favor with his bosses at City Hall. One man was shot dead at a homeless camp on Wednesday night and at least three women were injured in a stabbing spree on Thursday night, allegedly by a woman who was later arrested outside the ARCH homeless shelter with a knife (she confessed to stabbing five people, though only three victims came forward).
Another reason could be that the chief feels he doesn’t owe his position to the mayor or council. He’s not an outside political hire but a 30-year veteran of the force. He was meant to serve only as interim chief but won promotion to the role permanently for his handling of the 2018 package bombings.
One thing that could make Manley happier is if the city hired more officers. He spoke recently about the staffing shortage at the police department, which is looking to fill 180 vacancies. Last week the Austin Police Association said, “the City Council has Austin Police so short-staffed they’re dispatching on-call homicide, robbery, and other detectives to staff road closure barricades.”
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