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.