Public Safety Is a Budget Choice — And Harris County Chose Criminalization

Harris County spends 72.8% of its entire budget on what it labels “public safety,” fully aware that this spending does not actually create safety. The City of Houston follows the same pattern, spending roughly 64% of its overall budget on what it also mislabels as public safety.
In reality, this spending is not about safety at all. It is about the criminalization of race, poverty, immigration status, and class through the expansion of jails, law enforcement, criminal courts, and prosecution—while systematically shrinking investments in the things that actually keep people alive, like addressing: food insecurity, healthcare, cancer clusters, housing, mental health services, early childhood development, and economic stability.
When Harris County spends 72.8% of its budget on criminalization, it leaves only 27.2% to fund programs people need to survive. When the City of Houston spends 64% of its budget the same way, only 36% remains for life-sustaining services. That is not a values-neutral budgeting choice—it is a deliberate political decision.
The people who pay the highest share of their income in taxes are working-class people earning the least. Instead of using those dollars to address vulnerability and hardship, the city and county turn around and capitalize on those hardships, investing heavily in systems that punish people for being poor rather than supporting them so they don’t have to struggle in the first place.
There is a well-documented correlation between poverty and crime. Depending on where you come from, crime is often a cry for help—a fight to survive in a system that forces people into survival mode without a lifeline. The truth is simple: if people had what they needed, they wouldn’t have to do what they do to survive. But when survival is criminalized, people are left with impossible choices.
Texas state law makes this crisis even worse. Once money is allocated to law enforcement, it cannot be reduced—only increased. The Houston Police Department alone has a budget of over $1.8 billion, and that does not include the 63 other law enforcement agencies operating in the region. Meanwhile, the Houston Health Department’s budget is approximately $50 million.
There is no moral, economic, or public-health justification for this imbalance.
If law enforcement truly believes in community safety, then honesty is required. That honesty starts with acknowledging the harm and trauma inflicted on communities of color through reactionary policing, racial bias, and discriminatory practices. These approaches do not prevent harm—they reproduce it.
If public safety is the real goal, then the law enforcement budget must be frozen in order to fund the programs the most vulnerable need for survival. Or Law Enforcement must be willing to voluntarily give up portions of its budget to fund food security, housing, healthcare, mental health services, and economic support—because those investments are what actually prevent crime. And those programs must not be run by law enforcement. Police cannot be both the cause of harm and the solution to it.
We cannot jail, police, or prosecute our way to safety—or to liberation.
We can only resource our way there.
Urban Poverty and Neighborhood Effects on Crime: Incorporating Spatial and Network PerspectivesPMC4928692

The Relationship Between Poverty and Crime
the-relationship-between-poverty-and-crime