Posts Tagged ‘Austin Police Department’

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Austin Pays $10,000 A Day To Indoctrinate APD In Critical Race Theory, Demands Officers Sign “Contract” Before Even Taking Class

Thursday, July 29th, 2021

Austin is paying a consultant $10,000 a day to indoctrinate police in Critical Race Theory under the name of “Groundwater Analysis”:

The person they contracted with specializes in teaching Critical Race Theory. “Systemic racism,” “equity,” the whole nine yards.

But wait. It gets worse.

Attendees are required to agree to a “contract” stating that attendees must agree to certain conditions before taking the class, including:

  • Not taking notes
  • Not to talk about the class outside the class (“Vega rule”)
  • They must agree that the United States, Texas, Austin and APD are institutionally racist.

    • So before even taking the class, student are required to agree with the racist tenets of hard left Critical Race Theory.

    That’s a Soviet May Day parade of red flags, and probably illegal under Texas law, both due to being signed under duress and because there is no “mutual consideration” between the two parties. (Also note how the facilitator made sure that no lawyers were in attendance before offering up this “contract.”)

    Requiring APD officers to attend such a course, and agree to such terms a priori, is both unamerican and probably illegal.

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 10 Comments »

    Police Refunding Petition Makes Ballot To Fight Austin Crime Surge

    Tuesday, July 20th, 2021

    Just as they did with the homeless camping ordinance, Save Austin Now says they have enough signatures on their petition to restore police funding to make the ballot in November:

    “107 days from now, we are going to have an overwhelming victory,” Matt Mackowiak, co-founder of the activist group Save Austin Now and Travis County GOP chair said while announcing the group’s collection of over 25,600 signatures to restore Austin Police Department’s (APD) funding.

    The group was joined by representatives from the Austin Police Association, Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas, Texas Municipal Police Association, Texas Police Association, and the Austin Police Retired Officers Association (APROA).

    Nearly a year after the Austin City Council approved a $150 million APD budget cut and redirection, it appears likely its restoration is well on the way toward this November’s ballot. The group says every petition has been validated by themselves and expects a validity rate close to their mid-90s percentage for the homeless petition effort.

    While it fell short of the goal to collect 50,000 signatures in 50 days, only 20,000 is needed to secure a spot on this November’s ballot. Additionally, Mackowiak noted in a Monday press conference that 40 percent of the petitions sent in for this effort were from citizens that did not sign a petition for the camping ban reinstatement.

    Save Austin Now announced the effort in late May, not even a month after the group’s resounding success at the ballot box to reinstate the public camping ban.

    The APD-related petition effort does a handful of things:

  • Mandate a minimum staffing level of 2.0 officers per 1,000 residents
  • Establish a minimum 35 percent community response time standard
  • Require 40 additional hours of training
  • Oblige the mayor, city council, and city staff to enroll in the Citizens Police Academy
  • Facilitate minority officer hiring through foreign language proficiency metrics

    • “Our ballot measure ensures that the Austin Police Department is not solely subject to the [city council,]” said Save Austin Now co-founder Cleo Petricek, a mother and Democrat.

    APD currently has over 160 patrol vacancies and is 390 officers short of an adequate staffing level — widely considered two officers per 1,000 residents. APD is currently at 1.2 officers per 1,000 residents, according to department figures.

    The petition is extremely timely considered that almost every indicator shows everything getting worse post-defunding:

    Last year, the Democrat-run Austin City Council, urged by local anti-law enforcement activist groups, defunded the Austin Police Department by a whopping one-third ($150 million). Since then, APD has been forced to disband multiple units (including DWI, family violence safety and stalking, and criminal interdiction), cancel multiple cadet classes, and watch a growing wave of officers leave the force.

    On the streets, [APD Interim Chief Joseph] Chacon said 911 response times are “dramatically” slower, and violent crime has already surged to record numbers in 2021.

    “We’ve never really seen [that level] here before,” he said, referring to the rising number of homicides.

    Chacon said the department is losing 15-20 officers a month, and their understaffing is “not sustainable.” He projected 235 vacancies by May 2022 and 340 by May 2023.

    And make no mistake about it: The budget cuts are the main reason police are leaving the force:

    “Holly Pilsner” is the pseudonym she has used on Facebook for years. She didn’t want to use her real name for this story. She wrote a public post, after she turned in her badge, calling out the $20 million cut to the APD budget and the tense politics around it.

    “I think we all feel eviscerated to be honest with you,” she said. “We do love our community.”

    Pilsner was on patrol for seven years in northwest Austin before moving to the risk-management unit.

    She says she started thinking about leaving the force last summer — claiming the protests were different than they were portrayed. “Everything was a peaceful protest, peaceful peaceful — it wasn’t peaceful,” she said.

    Meantime, the department is feeling the squeeze. Some units have been shut down. Just last week, officers at the scene of a deadly shooting told us they’re having a hard time responding to Austin’s surge in violent crime.

    And things just keep getting worse:

    Another big driver of higher crime rates is radical, George Soros-backed Travis County Jose Garza, who seems to see his job as keeping criminals on the streets of Austin:

    Garza seeks to end the prosecution of crimes: “As you know, on March 1st we implemented a bail policy that asked our prosecutors to ensure that no one is in jail simply because they cannot afford to get out. Our policy prioritizes the safety of our community and our prosecutors have been working hard to re-evaluate open cases according to that community safety framework instead of a wealth-based system.”

    Instead of handcuffing criminals, Garza is handcuffing the prosecutorial process and Lady Justice herself. Garza is inline with a national effort to cripple his department’s prosecutorial ability in advancing a radical ideology that’s focused on completely redesigning the city’s – and the nation’s – criminal justice system. This dangerous reality is also being peddled by a new brand of Bernie-endorsed Democrats across the country.

    As far as Garza is concerned, police and crime victims don’t count at all:

    On March 15, 2021, about two months into his tenure, Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza (D) issued a secret standing order regarding the handling of felony cases in the county. It went into effect immediately…

    Garza’s standing order opens with “In the interest of justice and fairness for all persons arrested for felony crimes,” never mentioning crime victims. In fact, the secret order fails to mention victims of crime even one time. It is solely focused on the DA’s power to decline to prosecute arrestees, and what it demands the Travis County Sheriff’s Office should then do when Garza’s office declines prosecution.

    Snip.

    I spoke with Charley Wilkison, executive director of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT), about this Tuesday morning. The easy-going Wilkison was livid about the order and told me that law enforcement officers have already seen its effects. They are seeing suspects they take in on felony charges released so quickly, per Garza’s order, that they are back on the streets before officers even return to their precincts. This indicates the DA office’s review may not be very thorough. He noted that homicides are up more than 50%. Northwest Austin suffered yet another fatal shooting Monday night, pushing homicides up near 50 for the year.

    DA Garza’s tenure has already come under scrutiny multiple times since he took office in January 2021. Crime is skyrocketing on his watch, while he has openly prioritized prosecuting cops on cold cases that have already been investigated. He has set up a catch and release system that put an 8-time felon back on the streets, where he perpetrated a 10-day armed robbery spree and led law enforcement on a chase from just outside Houston into Austin. More recently, an assistant prosecutor quit the office, claiming Assistant District Attorney Trudy Strassburger ordered her to delete evidence from case files. The Austin Police Association has called for an investigation into this disturbing case. If the name in that case rings a bell, Strassburger is the same assistant district attorney who solicited for lawyers who want to prosecute police officers to apply for work with the Travis County DA’s office. The Travis County district attorney’s priorities are more than clear with Garza at the helm: ignore crime victims, hastily release felons and accused felons, and prosecute police officers.

    And he just hired former Hayes County Judge Millie Thompson, who was crazy she had to resign after four months, for the “Civil Rights Division” (AKA, to prosecute police).

    The Travis County DA’s office doesn’t seem to hire the best:

    Mayor Steve Adler is, as usual, nowhere to be found:

    Crime is spiking hard in Democrat-run cities across the country, many of which defunded their police and then proceeded to demoralize them. Austin is not only not an exception to this, it led the way with one of the nation’s largest defuding efforts. Adler led the city council to gut the police budget by about $150 million, a third of its budget. The cuts included key community policing and intelligence units.

    What on earth did he expect would happen when he led defunding of the city’s police? Why hasn’t anyone in the mainstream media asked him how he expected defunding to play out, versus what’s actually happened?

    Why don’t the anchors ask him about a) defunding, and b) the consequences of defunding?

    The usual idiots, of course, are shocked at the very idea of adequately funding police:

    As previously documented, the hard left wants to keep police defunded so they can get their fingers on as much money and power as they possibly can.

    Austin’s leftwing citizens finally woke up enough to vote for proposition B in May. Let’s hope they do they same to restore police funding in November.

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats | 2 Comments »

    Reimaging Austin Police: Absolute Fucking Lunacy

    Wednesday, July 7th, 2021

    The hard left-wing, Critical Race Theory-embracing, Social Justice Warrior-staffed “City-Community Reimagining Public Safety (RPS) Task Force” has come up with recommendations for “reimagining” (i.e. defunding and destroying) the Austin Police Department. And most are absolutely bugfuck insane.

    All across the country, more mainstream Democrats are waking up to the fact that the “defund the police” messaging crushed them at the polls, hemorrhaging black and Hispanic voters to the GOP in record numbers. But that didn’t deter the task force in the least! They’re going full steam ahead with the same madness that’s resulted in skyrocketing crime rates across the country.

    The document is filled top-to-bottom with wokespeak codswallop, but a whole lot of it boils to a single word: GIMME! Over and over again, the RPS task force, staffed from leftwing activists groups, demands that taxpayer money be taken away from the police and funneled directly into their pockets. Let me see if I can translate the choicer bits into comprehensible English:

  • “Equity Reinvestment in Community Working Group Goal: Identify and create upstream mechanisms that prevent the need for policing and invest in impacted communities to address long standing inequities.” Translation: Take money away from the police and give it to us so we can spread the graft and fraud far and wide among far-left activists.
  • “There is both a need for immediate, direct economic support for Austin residents who have been made the most vulnerable and are facing critical needs as well as long-term and sustain-able investment in community equity.” Translation: Spend more money on welfare so we can get our paws on it and create more voters dependent on the state.
  • “The City invest at least $11 million from the current fiscal year budget to be used to address the needs of 10 neighborhoods that have high concentrations of poverty, high unemployment, limited access to health insurance, high concentrations of COVID cases and/or a high level of need for basic-needs assistance based on calls to 2-1-1.” Translation: No, really, we want all the money to flow through us so we can wet our beaks.
  • “The City invest $44.8 million annually starting in FY 2021-22 to support long-term and sustainable investment in community equity. a. The City will develop strategically located neighborhood ‘hubs’ managed by local grassroots organizations and administered by the City’s Equity Office in collaboration with Austin Public Health.” Translation: SHUT UP AND GIVE US THE MONEY! WE WANT ALL OF IT! ALL OF IT MUST FLOW THROUGH OUR STICKY FINGERS! COUGH IT UP!
  • “Oversee the implementation and distribution of a guaranteed income pilot program for residents in the hubs’ jurisdiction in the form of direct recur-ring cash payments. Total $12 million annually.” Translation: We’re taking money from police and paying people not to work. And you’re paying for it, Austin taxpayers.
  • “There are a number of Austin neighborhoods that are suffering simultaneously from over-policing and under-investment.” Translation: Take money from the police and give it to us!
  • “The City via the Equity Office will set aside $100,000 each for 10 neighborhood areas that have seen the greatest health and economic impacts from the pandemic. The City, through the Equity Office, must engage community partners (organizations) already engaged with and centering residents, to identify and distribute to residents in need.” Translation: Give us $1 million in slush funds we can use for ‘walking around money’ to buy votes! (I do note that one of the criteria for determining which neighborhoods get designated is “Areas lacking tree canopy coverage.”)
  • “Annual Investment of Funds to Support Neighborhood Hubs. Once at least five neighborhood hub sites have been selected, the City Equity Office will designate panels of community members that will select partner organizations to manage and lead the organization of each hub. Screening should be stringent; the panel should demonstrate that selected organizations have an established history of direct community engagement and out-reach with directly impacted communities, especially non-white communities, marginalized and underserved populations, and other survivors of structural violence.” Translation: Create government organizations for money transfer and then put leftwing groups in charge of them!
  • “These neighborhood hubs will be created and staffed by the neighborhoods, and local community members will determine and prioritize both the needs in their community that the hubs should address and what resources are needed.” Translation: Give us patronage jobs for leftwing cronies!
  • “As an additional step towards this City’s divestment from policing and investment into community wellbeing, stability, growth and safety, this Working Group supports and calls for the implementation of the Community Health Workforce recommendation set forth by the Public Health Reinvestment working group. We believe the development of a community health worker workforce complements our recommendations in advancing our goal of equity reinvestment.” Translation: Fire police officers and hire leftwing social workers instead!
  • “Utilize paid commercials, TV, Radio, social media, billboards & busses, bus stops (in mul-tiple languages) to notify the community about City Council conduct prior to, during and post any city council meetings.” Be sure to kickback some money to our friends in the leftwing media via ad dollars.
  • “IMMEDIATELY invest $5M for the Communications & Public Information Office (CPIO) budget to cover translation and interpretation services.” Translation: Fund our Ministry of Propaganda!
  • “Fund immigrant defense through the public defender’s office.” Translation: Use taxpayer money to hire leftwing lawyers to keep illegal aliens here so they can vote for Democrats when we amnesty them.
  • “Include a base budget line item for community engagement, flexible funds to pay partners (community organizations) for the following (including/but not limited to):
    • translation/interpretation services
    • child care
    • venue support
    • remote access support
    • request community organization(s) to provide facilitation
    • community person(s) who can provide above
    • stipend for resident(s) with lived experience to support above

    Translation: Hire more leftwing activists!. You have to admire the chutzpah of demanding money for “resident(s) with lived experience.” (Critical Race Theory postulates that only non-white people have “lived experience.”) They want taxpayers to pay leftwing activists merely for living.

  • “$250K, annually, added to the base budget of the Equity Office for 2 new staff members (salary/benefits for 2 FTEs).” Translation: Hire more leftwing activists for leftwing agitation!
  • They want to “Take contracting out of APD control.” Because of course they do. Translation: You have to let us stick our fingers in all the pies!

    • Additional police units and functions they want to defund:

    • $216,581 Crowd management
    • $2,276,488 Gang Suppression Unit
    • $312,381 Nuisance Abatement
    • $600,00010 Riverside Togetherness Project
    • $1,453,743 US Marshals’ Lone Star Fugitive Task Force
    • $685,161 Weapons and military supplies (rifles, pistols, ammunition, “less lethal”, targets & backers)
    • ~$7.6M Training and recruitment of new cadets
    • $3,174,647 Overtime
    • $5,634,493 Park Police
    • $2,042,835 Mounted Patrol
    • $53,519 Specialized Patrol
    • $17M ~10% of “Neighborhood policing” patrol
    • $7,408,707 Motors

    They want to get rid of the mounted patrol because they’re too popular, provide good press for the police, and are effective at countering antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioters. Same thing for police dogs (“Dog bite incidents primarily involve Hispanic and Black men,” i.e., the same demographics that disproportionately commit crimes), which are too popular and effective to keep funding.

    $4,471,999 Special events: Take APD entirely out of event review and security. Convene a team of community members to co-create a re envisioned [sic] process for event safety that includes unarmed security. Re-assess needs and reduce spending so that some of this money can be reallocated.

    Translation: We’re going to make every concert and event unarmed targets for mass shooters.

    Safety is…freedom of speech and movement without surveillance In Austin, community members who are organizing events or simply going about their daily lives are subject to ever-growing surveillance. Through video surveillance and real-time monitoring, we are all being watched. Through the Austin Regional Intelligence Center (ARIC), a cadre of untrained informants are encouraged to report “suspicious behavior”. Recently, Black activists organizing cultural events were surveilled by a social media mining contract, also through ARIC. This data, as well as police interactions are uploaded into databases shared with hundreds of other law enforcement agencies, including DHS and ICE. This surveillance leans into Trumpi-an narratives of Black organizers as “Black Identity Extremists” and lays the groundwork for COINTEL-PRO style attacks on community organizers at the local and federal level. It also endan-gers immigrant communities by sharing their location data with ICE, placing anyone who leaves their home at risk of deportation and family separation. The city must immediately defund and decommission this surveillance infrastructure and ensure that data is deleted from shared law enforcement databases.

    Recommendations:

    1. Defund the following budget items
    • $2,022,228 Austin Regional Intelligence Center (ARIC)
    • $2,402,429 *Real Time Crime Center / HALO
    • $55,500.00 StarChase Pursuit Management Technology Solution

    Translation: Stop watching our precious criminals and violent leftwing radicals!

    “The Patrol & Surveillance working group met with 40 people directly impacted by incarceration, deportation, or immigration enforcement.” Translation: We met with crooks and illegal aliens. Shockingly, they don’t like police, and approve of transfer money from police to us.

    Safety is…ending the war on drugs and treating drug use as a public health issue Communities of color have been deeply harmed by the war on drugs. Many drug possession and distribution statutes were crafted to have intentionally harsher sentences for substances more often used by Black, brown, and poor communities. Many disparities remain. The 2020 Austin racial profiling report showed stark racial disparities in probable cause searches leading to arrest and prosecution for drug charges. K9 units can exacerbate the impact of existing bias, as it has been shown that handlers often consciously or unconsciously cue their dogs when they expect to find something, which then allows a search. They can also lead to greater use of force and escalate encounters unnecessarily due to the historic trauma associated with police dogs, particularly for Black Americans.18 Furthermore, criminalization and incarceration fail to address addiction or its underlying causes. Imagine the behavioral and mental health treatment services that we could fund with $10.4 million, and the impact on safety in families and communities if the city fund-ed recovery instead of punishment.

    Recommendations:

    1. Defund the following budget items:
    • $1,713,812 K-9 Unit
    • $1,286,953 K-9 Interdiction
    • ~7.5M Narcotics (conspiracy, support, street) Total: $10.4M
    2. Reallocate this money to fund:
    • Behavioral and mental health treatment services, particularly Harm Reduction drop-in centers and concurrent Medication Assisted Treatment programs as recommended by the Public Health Reinvestment working group
    • Low-income and supportive housing, including a harm reduction housing first program as recommended by the Public Health Reinvestment working group and housing trusts for trans people of color, housing subsidy programs, and crisis safety net programs as recommended by the VSSP working group.

    Translation: “We love those giant open-air crack, heroin and meth markets in Baltimore, San Francisco and Seattle and want them here in Austin!” Also, note, once again, the desire to funnel money into homeless housing. The Homeless Industrial Complex must offer lots of opportunities for graft, given how hard leftwing grifters push for it.

    We will save observations on the difference between ad hoc de-facto legalization of narcotics and actual conscious phased legalization for another time.

    They even object to APD handing out food and toys.

    When uniformed officers run programs for under-resourced kids or hand out baseball cards in schools, we are teaching a whole new generation that safety means police, even as youth of color are killed by police outside the limited context of those programs. It is APD’s responsibility to stop the harm, not the community’s responsibility to trust or forgive police while harm continues to occur. Instead of paying officers to do damage control for APD’s image, the city should reallocate these resources to fund community based initiatives that truly prevent and address violence.

    Translation: 1. Cops are always evil. 2. Hard left organizations are “the community.” 3. “Reallocate these resources” means, as always, “Give us all the money!”

    Over and over and over again, all RPS “suggestions” boil down to the same thing: “Give us the money, and create sanctioned leftwing bureaucracies that entrench our power and control.” By contrast, they want APD disarmed and powerless.

    Here are some other lunatic suggestions:

    • The entire $210,604,299 Neighborhood-Based Policing line item in the APD budget should be phased out because it is based on an inherently problematic model. Driving around looking for “criminals” is based in a system of surveillance and control enforced through the threat of violence.
    • No more cadet classes. Training officers in this model will inevitably create an “us vs. them” mentality regardless of what the training looks like.
    • Phase out all use of deadly weapons. Maintaining a fully armed and staffed police force is a public safety threat. It is intolerable that many Black and Brown people pulled over in traffic stops fear for their lives from the people who are paid to protect them. This reality cannot be addressed with more community outreach; it will only be resolved by stopping the danger to their lives.
    • Traffic enforcement should be decoupled. State level changes are needed to decriminalize traffic offenses and allow unarmed civil servants to direct traffic and make stops for civil traffic violations. There are some interim changes that are possible now.
    • Reallocate money from policing to reinvest in economic, health, and housing resources that create REAL safety and well-being for overpoliced communities. Communities of color are deprived of the resources they need to survive, which fuels a vicious cycle of criminalization. We are all safer when everyone in our community has what they need to survive.

    And by “all” they mean “left-wing activists” and by “safer” they mean “richer.” They just want to defund and disarm the police so antifa and #BlackLivesMatters mobs can run riot over the city. Is that so much to ask?

    The entire paper is full of logical fallacies, such as jumping from “police can’t prevent all crimes” to “police are useless and should be defunded.”

    The rest of the document is a laundry list of leftwing causes, from solar power to free bus passes for anyone on welfare.

    Here is a list of all the hard-left lunatics who contributed to this report, so we can know in the future never to trust anything any of these people are involved in ever again:

    • Brion Oaks – Chief Equity Officer, Equity Office
    • Paula X. Rojas – Communities of Color United (CCU)
    • Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde – Deputy City Manager
    • Rey Arellano – Assistant City Manager
    • Shannon Jones – Interim Assistant City Manager
    • Farah Muscadin – Director, Office of Police Oversight
    • Quincy Dunlap – Austin Area Urban League
    • Hailey Easley – Austin Asian Community Health Initiative
    • Jessica Johnson – Texas Fair Defense Project
    • Monica Guzmán – Go! Austin/Vamos! Austin (GAVA)
    • Priscilla Hale – allgo
    • Dawn Handley – Integral Care
    • Chris Harris – Texas Appleseed
    • David Johnson – Grassroots Leadership
    • Amanda Lewis – Survivor Justice Project
    • Nelson Linder – National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
    • Kathy Mitchell – Just Liberty
    • Chas Moore – Austin Justice Coalition
    • Cary Roberts – Greater Austin Crime Commission
    • Matt Simpson – American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
    • Alicia Torres – ICE Fuera de Austin
    • Cate Graziani – Texas Harm Reduction Alliance
    • Marisa Perales – City of Austin Environmental Commission/Texas Campaign for the Environment Fund/Clean Water Action
    • Andrea Black – May First Movement
    • Elias Cortez – Texas Harm Reduction Alliance
    • Raul Alvarez – Community Advancement Network
    • Nyeka Arnold – Black Austin Coalition

    Needless to say, Austin should defund any “Equity Office” and no taxpayer money should fund any of these organizations in the future.

    Note: The Austin City Manager will unveil a new budget on Friday, so sane Austinites should be prepared to fight hard if any of these garbage ideas are included.

    (Hat tip: johnnyk20001.)

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Budget, Crime, Democrats | 22 Comments »

    Sixth Street Shooting Shows Austin’s Continuing Slide Into Lawlessness

    Sunday, June 13th, 2021

    If you live outside Austin, you may be unaware that at least 13 people were injured in a shooting in downtown Austin early Saturday morning since none of the victims died:

    During a briefing Saturday morning, Interim Police Chief Joseph Chacon said the shooting happened at 400 E. 6th Street, which is near Trinity Street. There are many bars in the area. The initial 911 call about shots fired came in at about 1:24 a.m.

    Chacon said 11 people are now receiving treatment at one hospital, while one victim went to a separate hospital and another received treatment at an emergency room. There are no deaths to report at this time.

    Two of these patients are in critical condition, according to Chacon.

    Police said they are still searching for the suspected gunman. Chacon could only share a vague description at this time. He said the suspect may be a Black man with a “skinny” build and locs-style hair. A motive for the shooting is not yet known.

    “Locs-style” evidently means “dreadlocks.” I was previously unaware of this new linguistic usage.

    “Skinny black guy with dreadlocks” would seem to be a specific enough description for police to start interviewing possible suspects, but not for the social justice-infected partisans at the Austin American-Statesman:

    Translation: “We don’t want to tell you the shooter is black.” Despite their efforts, one suspect is in custody.

    Back in 2019, I noted that Sixth Street (long known as Austin’s nightlife bar row) had gotten so dangerous that there’s a YouTube channel dedicated to Sixth Street brawls. (I’d provide a sample, but they’re non-embedable.)

    This is just yet another example of Austin’s long slide into disorder and lawlessness engendered by the policies of Mayor Steve Adler, Austin City Councilman Greg Casar⁩ ⁦and his fellow travelers, and Travis County DA Jose Garza, who inflict this chaos on law-abiding Austin citizens while stripping away the Austin Police Department capability to maintain order.

    Austinites are suffering through a crime wave because the hard left Democrats in charge of the city have inflicted policies designed to increase crime in the name of “Social Justice.”

    Update: One of the shooting victims has died. “Police identified the victim Sunday as 25-year-old Douglas John Kantor.”

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 4 Comments »

    Austin T Minus 2 Update

    Thursday, April 29th, 2021

    Two days from now, Austin voters will go to the polls to decide the fate of reinstating the camping ban, along with a number of other proposals. (Cheat sheet: Vote for Proposition B and against everything else.) So here’s an update on Austin news in advance of the election.

  • Austin crime has exploded, and it’s all due to the feckless actions of leftwing politicians:

    Three members of the Austin City Council (AKA local control/city government) politicians are guilty of promoting the crime-enabling policies not unique to Austin. Mayor Steve Adler, Greg Casar, and Natasha Harper-Madison are the main culprits who expedited this radical shift away from public safety. Mayor Steve Adler has shown a careless lack of leadership on the issue, most notably during the Summer 2020 city-wide riots. Greg Casar has used the issue to push his Marxist values. Natasha Harper-Madison has exploited the safety of Austin citizens in order to promote her racism and perpetual victim ideologies. History will judge the actions of these three local partisan politicians poorly. How long are Austin citizens going to continue to sit back while these three continue their radical progressive experiment to the detriment of the city?

    Austin was one of the most sought-after, safest cities, but in 2020, there was an increase in murders by 50% from the previous year. Currently in 2021, there have been a whopping 21 murders to date. Austin is well on its way to breaking last year’s record number of murders.

    Also, this is a pretty sobering chart:

  • Paul Martin on factors driving crime increases in Austin:

    First, our police department is losing officers. The latest information can be found here, but here’s a summary for the TL;DR crowd:

    Last year, the Austin Police Department lost about eleven officers per month through resignations and retirements. In the first four months of this fiscal year, the police department has already lost an average of fifteen officers per month. The department will have more than seventy-five vacancies by the end of January, in addition to positions previously cut from the budget.

    (emphasis original)

    Fewer officers in a city with a growing population means fewer officers per citizen. This means increased response times for even high priority calls. Increased response times mean less policing and thus less deterrence to crime.

    The second component to this is the new policy in the Travis County District Attorney’s office under which the D.A. “will present all use-of-force cases [of law enforcement] to grand juries that involve deaths or serious injuries.” In other words, any time a citizen is injured during an arrest, the arresting officer runs the risk of being subjected to the grand jury process. The concern here is that officers will be less likely to use force moving forward. Violent criminals know this, and they know the officer will be reluctant to use force to take them into custody.

  • Matt Mackowiak makes the case for reinstating the camping ban:

    1) The homeless community has exploded, from around 2,500 to what I estimate to be 5,000 now, although according to Austonia a report commissioned by consultants for the city recently put the estimate at 10,000.

    2) Homeless fires are on track to double last year’s all-time record (to 503), endangering homeless Austinites and their personal property and our courageous firefighters.

    3) City parks are being destroyed all over the city, despite the fact that the camping ordinance specifically exempts parks from legal camping.

    4) Every single major highway intersection is worse today, and this is especially visible on Hwy. 183 and Hwy. 71, as well as on IH-35.

    5) Public safety in Austin is at the worst I can ever remember (I arrived in Austin in 1984), with our homicide rate set to double this year (after last year’s all-time record), and regular violent attacks by homeless individuals happening almost daily at this point. A quick review of the Citizen app will cause you to lose sleep at night.

    6) Public health in our city is far worse today than it would be without the ordinance, as the city had no plan for the human and physical waste created by camping, and we regularly see human feces, drug needles and other waste at encampments across the city.

    7) Tourism has taken a direct hit. Major hotels are losing conferences, visitors are shocked to see what’s become of Austin, and the related economic effect on the hospitality and service industries has been profound.

  • Austin’s homeless policies have made the problem worse:

    What is happening in Austin is nothing short of a humanitarian crisis. It threatens the health and safety of the community, and in particular of those struggling with homelessness.

    According to pre-COVID-19 data released in late March by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the number of Austin’s unsheltered population—those who live in makeshift tents around the city—has risen a staggering 93% since 2016.

    The Austin metro area represents 7% of the overall population of Texas, but about 25% of Texas’ unsheltered population today resides on its streets today.

    Snip.

    It is important to understand the origin of Austin’s homelessness surge. In 2013, HUD rolled out a one-size-fits-all homelessness policy, called Housing First, with spotty evidence of efficacy. Their “solution” to homelessness? Provide life-long, “no strings attached” housing—no requirement of sobriety, no work requirement, no requirement to access services to change the behaviors that led to homelessness. Austin’s elected officials took the bait—hook, line, and sinker.

    HUD promised the Housing First approach would end homelessness in a decade. Instead, it resulted in an over 16% increase across the nation, including a 21% increase in the “unsheltered” population—ironically, the population for which this approach was originally designed.

    Because Austin elected officials chose to follow HUD down an uncharted rabbit hole, Austin has experienced the same disastrous results, indeed the same disastrous results California has seen since it adopted Housing First in 2016—a stunning 37% increase in homelessness.

  • Could the Austin police department animal units be defunded?

    Austin’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force recommended in a work session Wednesday the idea of doing away with several police units in the next budget cycle. It suggests reallocating the money for other needs.

    Two of the units one workgroup focused on are those that involve animals — APD’s Mounted Patrol and K9 Units.

    “There are many tools police have. These happen to be very costly,” said Kathy Mitchell, chair of the workgroup that made the recommendations.

    The Reimagining Public Safety Task Force estimates that APD’s Mounted Patrol and K9 units collectively cost the city nearly $5.5 million a year.

    The real reason, of course is that the hard-left “Reimagining Public Safety Task Force” hates the police and wants to free up that money for left-wing crony graft. Plus they hate those units because they’re effective and provide good publicity for APD. Plus the mounted police are particularly good at breaking up riots before they start, which the #antifa/#BlackLivesMatter loving Austin left all but encourages.

  • Austin criminals are getting bolder:

  • Austin city government may finally be letting APD graduate a cadet class, but they’re changing training to “increase community engagement and involve citizen groups in the cadet training process,” which I’m pretty sure are codewords for cramming leftwing indoctrination into the curriculum.
  • More evidence of what Adler and the city council have brought to Austin:

  • It looks like conventions are returning post Mao Tse Lung, but a lot fewer groups want to have their conventions in Austin now that it’s turned into bumsville:

  • Speaking of conventions: Austin voters properly kicked leftwing City Councilman Jimmy Flannigan to the curb in 2020. Surprise! Right after his defeat, Flannigan landed a cushy $140,000 job with “Austin Convention Enterprises, or ACE, [a] public facilities corporation that was created by the city to own, finance and operate the downtown Hilton.” Evidently once you’re a corrupt leftwing insider, you get cushy sinicures carved out for you to keep you on the government teat no matter what voters think… (Hat tip: Adam Loewy.)
  • Steve Adler, liar:

  • Lots of Austin restaurants are bailing on downtown:

    “In downtown, we depend on foot traffic and vehicle traffic driven primarily by visitors, hotel guests, conventioneers and locals who want to bar hop,” [B.D. Riley’s Irish Pub] co-owner Steve Basile said. “There was no path that we could draw that was anywhere more optimistic than 10 or 12 months of financial loss before downtown began to see the things that made downtown what it was pre-pandemic.”

    Convention-less. Festival-less. Tourism-less. In downtown Austin, the pandemic has taken the regular menu of revenue drivers off the table, and the public health risks now attached to large, in-person gatherings and out-of-town travel have placed a particular burden on small businesses in the city’s central business district bound by Lamar Boulevard, I-35, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Lady Bird Lake.

    The drain has made the math especially difficult for restaurants and bars, where bottom lines also depend on a now-dissipated office workforce, and smaller real estate footprints exacerbate the impact of social distancing rules. According to Community Impact Newspaper’s tracking of business closures, at least 10 locally owned restaurants and bars have permanently pulled out of downtown since August but, like B.D. Riley’s, have maintained business operations in other parts of the city. Their reasons signal a pessimism about the pace of recovery in the city’s center.

  • Proposition E wants to move to ranked voting (which is illegal under Texas law anyway). Here’s why it’s a bad idea.
  • Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell speaks out against the Wilco homeless hotel”

  • A montage of Adler’s Austin:

  • First-hand evidence of sex trafficking among the Adlervilles, and how no government entity would help:

  • Truth:

  • Some numbers:

  • Your city government in action: “Nobody knew how to restore power at Ullrich Water Treatment Plant during the freeze.”

    On a normal day, Ullrich Water Treatment Plant produces roughly half of Austin’s drinkable water and is crucial to keeping the city’s water system functioning.

    State regulations require the plant to either have access to a backup power source or a substantial amount of water reserves in case the plant sees an unexpected shutdown. Ullrich has both.

    So when a tree limb fell on an electric line leading to a substation that powered Austin’s largest water treatment plant on Feb. 17, backups should have snapped into place to keep power running and water production churning.

    But there was a problem: Nobody on site knew how to operate a 52-year-old gear switch that would have restored power to the plant.

    And so Ullrich Water Treatment Plant went dark for three hours in the middle of the worst winter storm to strike Central Texas in decades. It cut off roughly half of the city’s potable water production and deepened the winter weather crisis that at that moment had thousands shivering without electricity in their homes.

  • Hey, remember Mellow Johnny’s, the Austin bike shop that announced they would no longer sell bikes to APD? Well, guess which bike shop was recently burglarized?

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    Posted in Austin, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Waste and Fraud | 12 Comments »

    Austin City Council Continues Assault On APD

    Sunday, April 25th, 2021

    It’s obvious that the current Austin City Council hates the Austin Police Department, and will do anything they think the can get away with to strip it of money and power. The most recent example: They’re stripping 911 funding from the police to hand it over to a newly created department:

    In continuing to restructure the Austin Police Department, the City Council on Thursday voted to move 911 communications and several other services out of police control and into other city departments.

    The total funding to be transferred out of the Police Department’s budget will be about $33.3 million — much of it due to 284.5 full-time positions moving to other city departments.

    The decision builds on the council’s work during last year’s budget process when it cut or reallocated $150 million from the Police Department’s budget — one-third of the entire budget. The money removed Thursday came from funds that were set aside to explore shifting roles assigned to police to other city departments.

    Why strip money from a functioning 911 dispatch system? Obviously, because the current employees support the police department, and lack of control over it means it can’t be staffed with leftwing cronies, making it much harder to rake off the graft and embezzlement. The “efficiencies” the Austin City Council claims the move to an “Emergency Communications Department” will bring is efficiently siphoning taxpayer money from the causes for which it is earmarked and into the hands of the hard left. But don’t think the crazy stops there:

    Thursday’s vote followed a presentation earlier in the week from a community task force assembled by City Manager Spencer Cronk’s office to consider ways to improve public safety.

    The recommendations included removing various line items in the Police Department’s budget and investing them in low-income communities through things such as health care access, food, housing and sex worker outreach services.

    Some of the more extreme recommendations came from a four-person working group over patrol and surveillance. They included removing all deadly firearms from police officers and putting an end to new cadet classes. By eliminating neighborhood-based policing, the working group said the city would save $210 million that could be reinvested in communities of color.

    “Any City Council member who supports that should be fired,” [Austin Police Association President Ken] Casady said. “It’s crazy town. Just by reading this one recommendation this committee has lost all credibility.”

    Removing firearms from police and giving money to whores: Your Austin City Council at work.

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Waste and Fraud | 7 Comments »

    The Building Austin Policing Crisis

    Monday, April 12th, 2021

    Many of the cities that defunded police last year in a fit of social justice warrior-endorsed madness have reversed course once crime rates started spiraling. But Austin’s hard-left City Council seems stuck on stupid.

    After the Austin police budget cut on top of the repeal of the public camping ban, Austin crime and disorder has gotten measurably worse. Austin police are also leaving in droves:

    After the Austin city council voted unanimously to defund its police department by about one-third of its budget, in August 2020, many predicted that once the cuts kicked in a flood of officers would leave the force as soon as they could. The new district attorney’s policy of re-investigating police officers for closed cases is also expected to cause officers to resign or retire.

    The city council’s cuts officially kicked in and have been in place for a few months.

    PJ Media reports exclusively that APD is now suffering a huge surge of officer departures putting it on pace to shatter 2020’s record.

    In January 2021, sources tell PJ Media 20 officers retired from APD and eight resigned, for a total of 28 departures.

    In February 2021, five officers resigned and six retired, according to multiple sources, for a total of 11 departures.

    In March 2021, 24 more officers left APD, with 20 officers retiring. Additionally, three officers resigned and one was terminated.

    To put this into perspective, 2019 was the last non-pandemic year and the year before the city council cut APD’s budget. APD averages about 50 retirements or separations in a calendar year, and replaces them with cadets who have graduated from the police academy or officers who join APD from another force.

    APD saw 46 officers retire with another 22 resigning in 2019, according to local TV news station KVUE.

    2020’s numbers were exacerbated by the George Floyd riots; 78 officers departed or retired from APD from the beginning of those riots to the end of 2020, for a total of 89 separations, according to KVUE.

    Official 2021 numbers provided to PJ Media by the Austin Police Retirement System (APRS) break down as follows:

    • Prior to 2020, retirements averaged 50-52 per year over the last 5-6 years
    • Record number of retirements in FY 2020: 97
    • First-quarter 2021 retirements: 45

    Add to those 45 retirements the 18 resignations or terminations, for a total of 63 separations in just the first quarter of 2021. If the current pace continues, APD could lose approximately 252 officers — about five times the average number of separations for a year. This will impact public safety across the board, and according to the APRS, can impact retirees’ benefits as well. APRS raised the alarm about the impact the city council’s cuts could have in September of 2020.

    March 2021’s retirements hit all over the department, including tactical intelligence, gang crimes, narcotics enforcement, investigations, and the bomb squad, according to a full list provided to PJ Media. Traffic enforcement — both warnings and citations — has declined by more than 60% in the first two months of 2021, a source tells PJ Media.

    At the same time, the city council’s cuts have forced the cancellation of police cadet classes. The department is losing experienced officers in droves and is unable to replace them with new officers.

    Fewer officers means fewer officers to cover 911 calls, to the point that some 911 calls now result in “NUA”s: No Officer Available:

    The situation is made worse by the fact that hard-left Travis County DA Jose Garza has announced he’s not prosecuting drug crimes, but is keen on indicting Austin police officers on even minor infractions:

    Indicting police officers who have committed crimes is proper. Referring every allegation against a police officer to a grand jury—a promise Garza repeatedly made as a candidate–is not. It is not proper because it is not how allegations against all others are handled. Singling out persons based on their status is discriminatory and, ironically, itself an abuse of power. Such overt antagonism against law enforcement undoubtedly will erode cooperation between APD and the DA’s office and impact adversely criminal justice in Austin generally.

    Garza clearly wants to promote a perception that police misconduct will not be tolerated and successfully indicting APD officers might serve that purpose. Failure to prosecute after indictment, however, ultimately will undermine public trust and confidence in Garza and his office. Garza’s hostility toward police can also engender public animosity toward APD as an organization. Effective policing requires community support. To the extent Garza persists in attacking APD as racist and corrupt, social and racial divisions will worsen and impede cooperation.

    Snip.

    Garza’s anti-law enforcement campaign closely resembled those of other Soros-backed socialist candidates for district attorney around the country. He promised to abolish the requirement of bail, to ignore laws he does not like and violations of those laws. He promised immunity to persons for conduct he considered status crimes. He promised to discriminate against police and to treat immigrants more favorably than citizens. Based on the actual policies of those DA’s elected in other large cities, it was entirely predictable that Garza would follow suit. My campaign sought to warn voters of the threat to public safety and security as evidenced by deteriorating conditions in cities like San Francisco, Portland and Chicago. Because Garza is an ideologue, he will not be deterred by the harm his policies will surely cause our community. He is more committed to his ideology than the rule of law.

    Is there any light at the end of the tunnel? Some. Face with rising murder rates, the Austin City Council finally relented and is allowing a new APD cadet class to be trained, though it looks like they’re going to try to cram “more community involvement” (a codeword for more far-left social justice warrior meddling) into the curriculum. And various bills are winding their way through the Texas legislature to address Austin’s idiocy.

    A huge improvement, of course, will happen if Proposition B passes on May 1st. But expect Austin policing to continue to get short shrift as long as Garza, Austin mayor Steve Adler and the current City Council remain in office.

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    Posted in Austin, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 3 Comments »

    Breaking: 2 Shot, 1 Stabbed in Austin Park

    Sunday, April 4th, 2021

    Here’s some breaking news for you:

    Police are responding to a shooting with ‘multiple injuries’ Sunday evening.

    Police say an initial call of shots fired came in a little after 7 p.m.

    Police have confirmed multiple people have been injured at 1600 Nash Hernandez Sr. Rd. near Edward Rendon Sr. Metro Park.

    That’s in east Austin just east of I-35 in a park just north of Ladybird Lake (AKA the Colorado River). It’s a little ways east from Chicano Park and near a recreational ball field/tennis courts/etc. area, just south of a working class Hispanic neighborhood that’s been gentrifying.

    APD says to avoid the area for the time being.

    I don’t know whether there are significant homeless camps in that park or not.

    Developing…

    Update: Suspect was reportedly shooting into a crowd at a time when multiple Easter celebrations were going on in the park. Police report none of the injuries seem life-threatening.

    Also: “Police report they have located and detained the shooting suspect, who is suffering from a gunshot wound.” (Hat tip: Teddy Brosevelt.)

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    Posted in Austin, Crime | No Comments »

    Abbott Receives Draft Proposal For APD Takeover

    Tuesday, December 22nd, 2020

    In the wake of the Austin City Council’s insane decision to partially defund the police, Governor Greg Abbott has received proposed legislation for the state to take over the Austin Police Department.

    More on the text of the proposal:

    Terry Keel, a former Travis County sheriff and state lawmaker, is one of the authors of the drafted language. Former State Rep. Ron Wilson is also behind the language.

    According to Quorum Report, the draft language states that “if the governor determines that the safety of a municipality’s residents is threatened because the municipality is providing insufficient municipal resources for public safety, the governor may issue a determination” that DPS should control the city’s police department. Keel previously told KVUE DPS and the city’s police department would work as a “special municipal police department division” that would answer to the DPS director.

    I looked but cannot currently find the actual text of the proposed bill in the LegiScan database.

    I’m of two minds about the proposal. Austin voters have made their bed by voting for the hard left, and both fairness and subsidiarity demand they be forced to lie in it. On the other hand, the protection of life, liberty and property is the very first duty of government. If the Austin City Council is unwilling to keep the city’s citizens safe, then the power and money necessary to do so should be removed from their hands.

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | 6 Comments »

    Jimmy Flannigan Goes Down In Flames

    Wednesday, December 16th, 2020

    A tiny glimmer of hope in Austin’s winter of discontent: Liberal city councilman Jimmy Flannigan was defeated by Mackenzie Kelly:

    Conservative challenger Mackenzie Kelly beat incumbent Jimmy Flannigan in the Austin City Council runoff election Tuesday, earning 677 more votes in District 6. Meanwhile, voters re-elected incumbent Alison Alter in District 10. She beat challenger Jennifer Virden by 587 votes.

    Kelly’s election will change the solidly progressive makeup the council has had the past two years. The positions she campaigned on are significantly more conservative than those of her fellow council members and she is the only council member to have an endorsement from the Travis County Republican Party.

    Snip.

    For the past two years, all eleven members of the Austin City Council — while they may have differed intensely on certain policy issues — have been generally progressive and unified in their ideals.

    This council approved a repeal of Austin’s ban on public camping in 2019 in an effort to decriminalize homelessness, an action that spurred heated debate in the community over how best to address homelessness. It has drawn statewide attention and criticism from the state’s Republican leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott.

    This council also unanimously approved the city’s budget for the 2020-2021 fiscal year, which will ultimately move around $150 million dollars from the Austin Police Department.

    Snip.

    elly, who will be a newcomer to the council, ran on her experience as a volunteer firefighter and president of Take Back Austin, which is pushing to reinstate the ban on public camping in Austin.

    “From standing courageously behind our law enforcement community to demanding safer conditions for our homeless population to fighting for transparency at City Hall, the voice of Northwest Austin is has been heard,” Kelly’s campaign said in a statement. “Considering the stark differences between my campaign’s priorities and the platform of the incumbent, their united voice is resoundingly clear this evening!”

    Maybe with one sane voice on the Austin City Council, we can at least break up the groupthink. It’s a start.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

    Speaking of Austin’s homeless problem, Texas Scorecard made me aware of the SeeClickFix to report things like trash on property, graffiti, etc. Maybe we should start taking pictures of every trashed transient camp and report it on that tool, every day, until action is taken.

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    Posted in Austin, Democrats, Elections, Republicans | 4 Comments »

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