As a mom in South Austin, I think about safety every day.
Like many parents across this city, I watched in horror after the recent string of shootings involving teenagers across Austin. The fear is real. Parents are exhausted from raising children in an environment shaped by violence, instability, and constant anxiety.
But what disturbed me was how quickly the conversation shifted toward expanding surveillance in Austin. More license plate readers. More systems collecting data on ordinary people.
We are told this will make us safer.
I find that logic deeply alarming because it mistakes watching people for actual public safety. How disconnected do you have to be to believe communities will accept constant monitoring as a substitute for stability and care?
I cannot think of anything more frightening than teaching the next generation that constant government surveillance is simply the cost of participating in public life.
Both of my daughters walk past a bus stop where a youth shooting happened just last year. That shooting happened while surveillance cameras already existed. And still, children were hurt.
Kids are going to school hungry. Families are terrified they will not be home when their children get off the bus because of immigration raids and economic instability. Young people are growing up surrounded by fear, trauma, and abandonment.
And somehow, the solution being pushed by Mayor Kirk Watson and city leadership is more surveillance and more money poured into carceral systems that have historically failed our communities.
Meanwhile, the conditions producing violence are left untouched. Families are living in instability and fear while communities carry enormous trauma.
Look, I’m no politician, and I don’t have some fancy degree, but this is not rocket science.
What feels lazy is continuing to treat surveillance as though observing our community’s suffering more closely is the same thing as solving it.
Real public safety is not created through constant monitoring. It is created through stable housing, strong schools, healthcare, economic security, community connection, and making sure young people do not fall through the cracks in the first place.
Year after year, city leaders continue expanding systems designed to punish communities while ignoring the conditions creating instability and violence to begin with.
Maybe it’s my instincts as a mother, but this does not feel complicated. As parents, we try every day to break cycles of harm so they are not passed down to our children. Shouldn’t we want the same for our communities?
But building those conditions requires long-term investment, political courage, and actual imagination.
Instead, year after year, city leaders continue expanding systems designed to punish communities while ignoring the conditions creating instability and violence to begin with.
Because people cannot be surveilled into stability.
Children cannot be punished into hope.
Communities cannot be monitored into healing.
At some point, we have to ask ourselves what kind of society we are building when governments somehow always find resources to expand invasive systems, but struggle to fund the things that actually help us thrive.
Because if surveillance and carceral systems were truly the answer, our communities would already feel safe by now.
Finding people after violence occurs is not the same thing as building the conditions that prevent violence in the first place.
What if Austin invested in the actual conditions that create safety? What if every child had access to healthcare or counselors? What if families could afford housing and food? What if children had safe places to go after school? What if communities had resources before they reached crisis?
Those are real public safety investments.
Right now, parents are raising children in a state of constant anxiety while being told the solution is to surrender civil liberties to the same government that has repeatedly failed to address the root causes of violence in the first place.
I do not want my daughters growing up believing freedom and privacy are luxuries they must trade away simply to exist in public.
Our children deserve real safety.
They deserve investment.
They deserve stability.
And we deserve leaders capable of providing real solutions instead of denying communities the very investments that actually prevent social collapse in the first place.
Catina Voellinger is the executive director of Ground Game Texas, where she leads statewide organizing campaigns focused on democracy, civil liberties, and working-class power. Raised in a working-class biracial family in Texas, her lived experience shaped her commitment to organizing and public advocacy. She lives in South Austin with her family.
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This article appears in May 29 • 2026.