PJM: A little less than a week ago, blue Austin made itself a laughingstock across the rest of Texas. The all-Democrat city council and its leftwing Mayor Steve Adler voted unanimously to chop $150 million out of the city’s $434 million dollar budget. That’s a cut of one third.
Austin did this as the WSJ revealed that the fast-growing city of about a million leads the nation in the percentage increase of homicides in 2020. Yes, its rate of increase is worse even than New York and Chicago.
Austin recently billed itself as safe. It can no longer honestly say that it is.
The cuts are draconian, and the nature of the cuts is nonsensical. For instance, the council voted to do away with the mounted unit. That unit has been very effective at establishing order when rioters illegally take over city streets, without having to resort to more kinetic means of clearing thoroughfares.
Austin’s former police chief, Art Acevedo, sounded off after the vote and warned of “consequences” for taking so many police officers off the streets and so many useful assets away from those officers who remain. He called on residents to rise up and oppose the cuts.
“If you don’t speak up now,” Acevedo said during an interview with the city’s CBS affiliate after the vote last week. “If you don’t speak up and absolutely set on fire those phone lines, the emails, the letters to your mayor and council, standby to standby. The economic engine that drives that great city, that provides the quality parks, the quality libraries, the quality life that we’ve enjoyed, I say we because I still have property there, is going to go by the wayside.” read more
Something really wrong when a city council in TEXAS votes to do away with it’s Mounted unit.
@Jarhead Cracka — I imagine most Texans will say that Austin isn’t actually IN Texas, but rather it’s SURROUNDED BY Texas.
Most Texans wish Austin would secede. Or fall of the Balcones Fault.
Al, I think you’re right. I always enjoyed my time in Austin, but that was mostly because of some very pretty gals. It is Austin Weird though.
If the police are defunded there is nothing to stand in the way of the decent people there clearing the town of their riffraff and other undesirables to make it a good place to live again.
An idea whose time has come.
Too late to save their stupid asses, the left will come to find out that those police protected them too.
Anon,
I was thinking close to the same.
Form a neighborhood/community armed watch.
Someone breaks into an Austin-ite’s house, gets shot dead.
Don’t bother to call the police, just dump the body into the street/trash bin.
The State should take over policing of the capital city. Keep City politics out of it.
Blue cities are collapsing economically. They would love to have rural Texas pay for their policing while they piss millions away trying to double down on stupid.
What, you think Austin(Travis County) is a freakish part of Texas? Dallas County(Dallas), Bexar County(San Antonio), Harris County(Houston) are SOLID BLUE and now even Tarrant County is trending blue(Ft Worth!)
Couple that with EVERY county along the Mex border solid blue and baby it’s demographically just a matter of time. The vast expanses of Texas like w Texas which I am intimately familiar with are sparsely populated and will be over whelmed by these densely populated urban areas.
People are pouring into the DFW area alone at a 10,000/month clip. Factor that shit in and the future for Texas ain’t pretty.
MMinAR: Maybe that explains why I’ve seen so many Texas license plates here lately.
If Abbott wants to protect Austin then the state should charge the city or withhold funding in the amount spent. This is completely unfair to the rest of us Texans paying property taxes and sales tax that fund this. Austin voted this insane mayor in who was first to shutdown SXSW to kick off all the closures and their demented city council that has approved homeless camping everywhere and this defunding. Screw them. If they want to live in a nightmare let them. Bailing out stupid needs to stop.
i don’t s**t in bexar, dallas, harris, travis counties unless @ a safe altitude & speed
Austin is a Communist tumor that needs to be cut out of Texas.
Oh, the left will be clamoring for those robot cops in 5,4,3…..
You know, the robot cops that the globalists have $$$ in, the ones who are AI calable…who aren’t prejudiced. The ones in Millie Weaver’s documentary. Except those robots are white in the video.