Voters in Texas’s second-most populous city, San Antonio, overwhelmingly rejected a ballot initiative on Saturday that would have decriminalized marijuana and blocked enforcement of abortion restrictions. Voters in Harker Heights, meanwhile, narrowly reaffirmed a cannabis decriminalization measure they previously approved last year but which was later repealed by local officials.
The results come as advocates await Senate action on a statewide decriminalization bill that passed the House last month.
The San Antonio measure would have blocked police from making arrests or issuing citations for low-level marijuana possession, prevented the enforcement of laws criminalizing abortion, banned no-knock warrants and made other reforms.
Advocates with Ground Game Texas, the organization that spearheaded the ballot initiative, turned in more than 37,000 signatures to qualify it in January. But after a heated campaign in which the police union strongly urged voters to reject the measure, they did so by a large margin of 72 percent to 28 percent.
The text of the proposal said that it would be “the policy of the City of San Antonio to use its available resources and authority to accomplish three goals of paramount importance: first, to reduce the City’s contribution to mass incarceration; second, to mitigate racially discriminatory law
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