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City Council Meeting Minutes April 21, 2020 Kristian Caballero: Dear Members of the San Marcos City Council: On behalf of Texas Appleseed, I would like to express our strong support of the ordinance being considered on the Tuesday, April 21, 2020, City Council Meeting supporting the San Marcos Police Department's Increased Use of Citations in Lieu of Arrest. We urge you to vote for passage of the ordinance in order to maximize public safety, promote equity and reduce racial disparities in the criminal legal system. We also urge you to undo several amendments to the ordinance made on April 7th that would significantly weaken its impact. Specifically: • We support reinserting the word "only" into Section 2, so that it reads, • "...SMPD officers may find it necessary to arrest a person suspected of having committed any of the above -listed offenses only if any of the following circumstances are present[.]" • We also support undoing the amendment to the 3rd exception listed in • Section 2, returning to language that reads: "There is reason to believe that the safety of persons (including the subject) would be imminently endangered by the release of the subject. In making this assessment, it shall be considered whether the subject has the physical or mental capacity to endanger the safety of themselves or the public, whether the subject is unlawfully carrying a weapon, and/or if the subject has made immediate threats against other individuals in the area." • We urge you to meaningfully include the community in the future working group sessions by changing Section 6, so that the impacted individuals, advocacy organizations, policy experts and the public have more meaningful input than brief public comment at the beginning of each meaning. Aside from undoing those amendments, we encourage you to reject other last-minute amendments beyond the simple, clean-up amendments that Anita Gupta from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center has suggested for the sake of clarity and precision in the ordinance language. In particular, we oppose any amendments that would narrow the acceptable forms of identification. We commend you for your leadership to reduce unnecessary and harmful arrests in your city, which will be a statewide model for other cities if the ordinance is passed with the original language. In doing so, you would protect San Marcos residents from the harms of arrests and jail stays that serve no public safety purpose, and in turn, make the City of San Marcos safer. A growing body of research demonstrates how devastating arrests and jail time are for low-risk individuals, causing loss of employment, loss of housing, interruption of medical and mental health care, and ultimately increasing their likelihood of re -arrests in the future and decreasing their chances for future financial stability. Your City of San Marcos Page 6