After the Mobile City Council voted unanimously last week to authorize a referendum on annexation, a campaign is now underway to turn out voters in the proposed annexation areas – all of whom currently get police protection from the city.

Those areas all lie in the city’s police jurisdiction, a belt of land that extends three miles outside of the city limits, something that annexation advocates argue may be going away soon.

“We’ve all come to the conclusion that police jurisdictions are going to be going away in the next five years, we expect,” Del Sawyer, chairman of the West Mobile Annexation Committee, said.

It’s not a far-fetched concern: in 2020, Alabama state Sen. Chris Elliott (R-Fairhope) introduced a bill to get rid of municipalities’ police jurisdictions, arguing that police jurisdictions are an exercising of municipality power outside of municipalities. That bill did not pass, but in 2021, a bill that Elliott filed reforming and limiting police jurisdictions made it into law.

Elliott’s hope is that, eventually, police jurisdictions cease to exist.