You’ve Got the Power
At a library in Waco, Texas, my husband and I pushed through the glass front doors and headed for a meeting room near the back. We were there to participate in a community conversation about cite and release, a controversial policing policy that recommends citations over arrests for certain misdemeanors.
We busied ourselves studying the handouts at our seats while waiting for the event to start—handouts that gave us helpful context. Cite and release works exactly how it sounds: for certain misdemeanors, offenders are given a citation with a court date and “released” back to their lives rather than arrested. Supporters argue that citing rather than arresting saves taxpayer dollars, minimizes alleged racial profiling, and reduces the number of people behind bars.
In 2007, the Texas Legislature passed a bill that allows cities to implement cite and release policies. It’s not clear if the practice actually reduces crime, but since then, six Texas cities have implemented it and the organizations behind the event my husband and I were attended strove to make Waco the seventh city on that list. If approved by the city council in its current form, it would direct law enforcement to issue a citation over an arrest for misdemeanors, including theft up to $750, driving with an invalid license, and criminal mischief up to $750.
Ultimately, the event didn’t convince me that cite and release would be the best way to improve policing or reduce crime in Waco. But being convinced or convincing anyone wasn’t my goal in attending. My goal was to simply show up. For a while, police reform was a topic I had stayed informed about through the Internet, but most of what I read had to do with policies and situations unfolding in other cities, in places where I had no presence and no opportunities for meaningful engagement on this issue.
It’s an awkward situation. On one hand, there’s an element of comfort to this. Who doesn’t like reading the news from the safety of their homes? But it can also be dangerous. Scrolling through the web from the comfort of my couch, it’s easy to mistake knowing a lot about various issues for actually being engaged. It’s easy to formulate opinions when I don’t have to worry about them being tested by people with different views or experiences. And it’s easy to think I have the solutions when I don’t have to test them against the context, culture, and tradeoffs of a specific community.
Not just that, but makes it harder to know how to take action. Isn’t this one of the most ironic effects of the web? Creating an illusion of agency by convincing us that since we know a lot about what’s going on around the world, that we’re actually empowered to participate in a meaningful way? For me, it’s having the opposite effect. Knowing so much about what’s happening in a dozen other cities around the world is actually making me feel more politically powerless than ever.
So, when I saw the flier about this community conversation hanging in a local café, I knew I had to go. It took a few weeks of convincing my husband, but the scheduled Thursday night arrived and we found ourselves sitting in these seats in a public library conference room. The event itself wasn’t life changing, but the simple act of intentionally moving from the disembodied world of Twitter feeds and living room opinions to the nuanced and granular world of a real conversation about an important issue, with real people, was a reminder of where our true political agency lies: it’s not on Twitter, it’s not in national or international headlines clamoring for our attention. It’s in our own backyards, neighborhoods, and communities.
In a time of increasing political and social turbulence, meetings like this one are what give me hope. Writing for Strong Towns is what gives me hope. Reading about what Strong Towns members are doing gives me hope. They all remind me that the local is our greatest sphere for political participation. It’s the sphere where we can put our values into action, where our “enemy” has a name and a family and maybe a cute dog that we see at the local park. It’s where we can see problems and have our greatest chance at solving them.
That’s why I’m a Strong Towns member and advocate: because in a time when the powers that be would have our eyes glued to the national and the international dramas shaping our world, Strong Towns reminds us that the local is the part of the world that we actually can change.
Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.