Dear John,

As tech companies move into the area, the city government increasingly caters to the industry’s well-paid workers, doing little to prevent displacement and instead cater to the supposed lack of safety facing newcomers. 

Austin is quickly suffering the same fate as Silicon Valley.

Today, Grassroots Leadership, Just Futures Law, and Mijente are releasing our latest report on this relationship and examines the links between tech companies, city projects, and increases in policing and surveillance of Austin residents.

Read the report at: bit.ly/ATXbigsecret

Some of the highlights include:

• In 2020, APD’s budget had $58 million for tech, surveillance, and biometric analysis. This kind of overreach opens the door for potentially racist targeting of Black and Latinx communities.
• Since 2019, APD has shared at least 141 utility reports of Austin residents from Austin Energy or Water with ICE to track, surveil, and detain immigrants.
• APD currently has a $42 million contract with Axon Enterprise for body cameras and related accessories. Body cameras are supposed to protect the public from police abuses, but APD can also use Axon software to build cases against the public. 

As the movement to defund the police goes deeper and deeper in cities across the country, we believe this is the first report in Texas published specifically calling out the amount local police agencies spend on tech surveillance contracts.

We hope this report encourages communities across the country, who are actively seeking to defund the police, to investigate how much their own police departments are spending on tech surveillance.

Join us this afternoon at 4pm on Facebook Live as we go into detail over the findings of the report, what our recommendations are, and what we as a community must do to ensure our public funds are re-invested into our neighborhoods' wellbeing and dignity, not our surveillance and policing. 

In solidarity,

Annette Price and Claudia Muñoz Acting Co-Executive Directors