Texas is in a state of fiscal crisis. Or, at least many of its school districts and municipalities are. All across Texas, from the biggest urban ISDs and metros to the smallest towns and exurban counties, local governmental bodies are feeling the increasingly painful fiscal pinch—and resorting to rigid austerity measures. 

The state’s 10 largest school districts, from Houston and Dallas to Austin and El Paso—collectively charged with educating a near-majority of Texas public school students—have all projected or enacted budgets that have them in a fiscal deficit. This is driven (in addition to factors like declining enrollment and property values) by an inadequately significant bump to the basic allotment of school funding last legislative session, as that funding has fast been consumed by inflation-fueled cost increases. Many districts across the state have been forced to close numerous neighborhood schools to alleviate the current strain. 

Austin Independent School District (ISD) had a roughly $181 million deficit projection that it’s trying to close with staff cuts, campus closures, and a litany of other downsizing measures. Dallas ISD has a $108 million budget deficit; Houston ISD $25 million; neighboring Cy-Fair ISD about $80 million. A spring survey by the Texas Association of School Business Officials found that over 70 percent of surveyed districts would need to make budget cuts and that 44 percent would end the year still in a deficit. 

Some of the largest cities and counties in Texas are also facing dire funding gaps. For instance, the City of Dallas is facing a $30 million budget shortfall and recently furloughed more than 4,000 municipal workers. Harris County, the state’s largest population center, is facing a “structural deficit” of $130 million, which could reach as high as $800 million by decade’s end. 

Cities and counties are between a rock and a hard place, as they’ve lost the healthy cushion of COVID-era emergency funds, which helped maintain and expand services, at the same time that they’ve become severely limited by the state government in how much revenue they can raise through property taxes. Sales tax revenues, once sky-high during the pandemic era, have also come back down to earth. While population growth continues to surge across Texas, local governments can’t keep up with the growing cost of payroll and supplies. In some cities like Dallas, their revenue bases are also under threat, as major corporate employers threaten to flee downtowns for the surrounding suburbs. 

This fiscal storm isn’t limited to localities, and it’s animating some of the marquee races on the ballot in November, namely the gubernatorial contest. 

Governor Greg Abbott, who is seeking an unprecedented fourth term in office after having led the state now for nearly a dozen years, would have you blame all those local fiscal crises on the tax-and-spend libs who preside over those big, bloated school districts and cities, just as he’d have you blame those entities for the persistent local property tax crisis. (There’s certainly plenty of blame and accountability to go around for local leaders, but the broader forces responsible for their fiscal realities are mostly out of their hands.) 

This is coming from a man who has perennially campaigned on promises to provide property tax relief to the burdened masses—via iterative state “buydowns” of local property taxes, which have now reached a cumulative cost of over $50 billion—and to variously handcuff localities’ ability to use their taxing power to maintain and expand operations. It’s part of a larger ideological project by the Texas GOP to make these local entities inert wards of the state government. (See, relatedly: the right’s persistent attempts to ban “taxpayer-funded” lobbying at the Lege, which would effectively prohibit professional representation of cities, counties, and ISDs in lobby-dominated Austin.) 

Of course, Abbott’s 2026 reelection bid is no different. Back in June, the governor held an event in Houston to roll out his most expansive property tax policy plan yet—one that goes squarely after the big blue cities of Texas. His plan includes components to require localities to get a nearly impossible two-thirds majority approval for tax rate hikes and to initiate a constitutional amendment that would effectively eliminate school property taxes. 

This would be an extremely heavy lift, even for a Texas Legislature that is increasingly under his thumb. But that new taxation system would also require the so-called Texas Miracle—unregulated, uninhibited economic growth—to stay white-hot for eternity. (Awkwardly, that economic aspiration has become increasingly untenable politically; see: Abbott’s embrace of the data center boom followed months later by his abrupt 180-turn to rein in development.) 

Further still, it’s not even clear that there will be enough money in the banana stand to cover (or just maintain) the cost of further property tax buydowns. The Big Three—Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and House Speaker Dustin Burrows—recently issued a letter to state agencies ordering them to prepare for 3 percent program cuts across the board (with the only exceptions being public ed funding and the shiny new private voucher program). 

There are also rumors around Austin that if Don Huffines, Abbott’s onetime nemesis who then won the GOP comptroller primary against the governor’s ally, becomes the next comptroller, he’ll bring an end to the halcyon days of bursting state surpluses by releasing a significantly more austere biennial revenue estimate, the blueprint on which state budgets are built. With ample surpluses, the state has built up its rainy day fund to record highs, at about $25 billion as of last year. Rosy revenue estimates have also lubricated recent sessions with an aura of abundance, as illustrated by the Lege handing out billions for new programs like private school vouchers, pro-Texas film tax incentives, dementia research, and so on. 

Abbott in 2023 (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Abbott made a point of trying to appease Huffines by getting his preferred candidate (and appointed comptroller), Kelly Hancock, who was demolished by Huffines in the primary, to resign early so Abbott could put Huffines in his place, making him the de facto incumbent heading into the general election against state Senator Sarah Eckhardt, an Austin Dem. 

Meanwhile, Democrats have been trying to turn fiscal crises in Texas into a useful campaign cudgel. For her part, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa has said that it’s time for Texas to stop hoarding excess taxpayer money and give it back to the people—in this case, calling for a $1,500 check to every Texas household. It’s a charmingly simple populist method, one that President Trump has wielded in the past and perhaps one that might force Abbott onto his back foot. 

Eckhardt, for her part, noted to the Texan over the summer that the state could pay off every single ISD’s budget deficit, “and we would still have roughly $24 billion in that reserve.”

Regardless of the outcomes in November, neither of those policy proposals is very likely to come to fruition. But, especially if Democrats enjoy anything like the sort of surge projected in the Texas House and beyond, Abbott’s expansive anti-city property tax “reform” isn’t either. 

If that’s the case, we could see Republican majorities at the Capitol respond similarly to how they did back in 2019, after losing more than a dozen legislative seats, when they narrowed their political focus to the meat and potatoes of overhauling state public education funding (well, kinda) and property tax reform. Perhaps then, local governments and school districts would get some real help—rather than just operating at the middle of the blast radius.  

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In the early hours of July 24, someone placed a call to Austin’s 911 dispatch. The male caller told the operator he was looking out of his window and saw a teenager who may have had a gun. He wasn’t certain it was a weapon, but the person was “messing with his waistband,” the caller said. He gave the address of a community park in northeast Austin, one with a playground and a basketball court. 

When police arrived only minutes later, the only person there was 17-year-old Anthoneil Williams II, a sociable, upbeat teenager, one who had never gotten in trouble with the police before. In body camera and surveillance footage of the incident, he appears to lift up his shirt and reach for his waistband. 

The three responding officers all pulled their triggers—not just once, but enough times for at least two officers to empty their chambers and reload. They kept firing after Williams had already hit the ground. Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services was called to the scene after officers determined no one else was around, but Williams died on that playground at 4:25 a.m. 

Afterward, the officers discovered there was no gun in Williams’ waistband—only a water bottle. They also found that Williams had placed the call.

Almost immediately following the shooting, Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis—who’s held the job since 2024—said, “All points are indicating that this was a suicide by police.” 

That didn’t sit well with people who knew Williams or with some in the community. Cluren Williams (no relation), an activist whose own brother was shot by APD in 2017, called the characterization “irresponsible” and “dehumanizing.”

Chas Moore, founder of the Austin Justice Coalition, told the Texas Observer: “I just can’t believe that a 17-year-old Black boy had somehow become privy to a world of ‘suicide by cop.’”

Moore added that he’s concerned by the normalization of the concept that APD applied to Williams. “It just shouldn’t be a thing. This is the only profession in the world where you could, presumably, put yourself in a position to be killed by them,” he said. “There’s no suicide by Chick-fil-A server, suicide by a firefighter, suicide by teacher.” 

Anthoneil Williams II (GoFundMe/Anthoneil Williams)

The label “suicide by cop” is divisive. It’s a term that shifts the blame for a police shooting to the victim and insulates police from liability—and one that can fundamentally alter how officers respond to an emergency call. It’s become one of the major lenses through which people view and understand police shootings, but the frequency, the attributes, and even the validity of the concept are ill-understood. 

There are indeed documented cases of people intentionally getting police to shoot them. In some instances, these people tell family members beforehand. Some leave suicide notes or tell 911 dispatchers what they’re about to do. But in most cases, the situation is less clear-cut, leading to a broader use of the label. 

The Observer analyzed media reports of 100 incidents from the past 20 years that involved the ubiquitous but poorly defined theory. These included cases in which someone was shot and killed by police and cases in which someone was arrested or died by suicide after reportedly attempting or threatening suicide by cop. In the majority of cases, police are the ones using the label, and they’re not always clear about why they think it applies. In some cases, police say the victim told officers to shoot or had told dispatchers that they were suicidal—but not always. 

In several cases, the theory was actually used as a defense strategy when a trial followed an altercation with police. If a person shoots at an officer in an attempt to get the officer to shoot back, that could convince a jury that a shooting wasn’t attempted murder but, rather, attempted suicide. On the flip side, officers may have an easier time justifying a shooting if they can argue they were forced into it. 

The reported instances stemmed both from mental health calls and from reports of crimes. Williams’ shooting, which was never logged as a mental health call, took place while the Austin City Council debated and later approved the city budget, which included more than $1 million allocated to restructuring the local emergency dispatch, separating it from APD. (In Williams’ case, the 911 operator asked if the caller needed police, fire, EMS, or mental health services, and he answered “police.”) 

Austin has had a dedicated mental health police unit since 1999, which trains officers to respond to mental health calls; some cities have moved away from police responses in these cases, though this model can struggle for lack of funding. 

In more than a third of the analyzed cases, news stories confirmed the person had a gun. In several cases, the weapon was actually a replica or BB gun, or the police misidentified something like a water bottle. 

There’s a reason that the label can be used in so many different circumstances: There’s no real consensus on what distinguishes suicides by cop from other police shootings. Some critics have dubbed it “junk science” and compared it to debunked concepts like “excited delirium,” the purported spontaneous death of people being restrained by police.  

“Suicide by cop draws on real-world examples—in this context, of people who want to die at the hands of police—and manipulates the definition to encompass a much larger category of cases,” wrote a University of California, Berkeley law professor in a 2025 article in the California Law Review.

The term was reportedly coined by a police officer-turned-psychologist in the 1980s, and in the two decades following, several studies purported to further refine the concept. These researchers determined that anywhere between 10 percent and a third of police shootings each year were actually suicides by cop. But, in 2026, there is no national database that tracks this highly subjective label. 

In a 2014 bulletin, the FBI defined suicide by cop as “a situation where individuals deliberately place themselves or others at grave risk in a manner that compels the use of deadly force by police officers.” The various studies try to identify characteristics of suicides by cop: Someone seems to intentionally seek out danger, they have or appear to have a weapon, or they escalate the situation when police arrive.

But all those characteristics could be at play in any police shooting where the victim didn’t want or intend to die. So police end up making the determination of someone’s suicidality, which mental health professionals note is tricky. In a 2020 article published in a journal by the American Psychiatric Association, the authors write: “When evaluating a patient, it is impossible to predict whether that person will take his or her own life.”

Until recently, training for how to deal with a potential suicide by cop incident didn’t exist. In 2019, the national Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) created the first training guide on the subject, with the imperative: “Responding to a possible SBC call: Your goal is to resolve it so that everyone goes home safely.”

Officers are instructed to take cover, “make small requests” rather than “bark[ing] orders,” refrain from pointing their guns, and be patient. 

Chuck Wexler, executive director of PERF, told the Observer that even after decades of hearing the term suicide by cop, he wasn’t clear on what it meant. After researching the theory and publishing the guidelines, he said the goal of using the label is to “prevent tragedies” and better understand police shootings.

“The term that we use is to explain the set of circumstances, but in no way to diminish the tragedy,” Wexler said.

After Williams’ death, protesters—including his school friends and his father—interrupted a city council meeting, rallied outside city hall, and entered the Travis County District Attorney’s Office, where they chanted: “Jail killer cops.”  

To reporters, 16-year-old former classmate Ameer Alogaili emphasized how he’ll remember his friend: “a little kid at a park” who could always “put a smile on everybody’s face.”

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