The Austin City Council’s partial defunding of the police back in 2020 continues to hurt law-abiding Austinites. Continued understaffing has left APD unable to fulfill what were previously considered basic police functions. Case in point: APD now asks robbery victims not to call 911.
Austin police in Texas are asking residents to call 311 if they get robbed near an ATM as the department struggles amid an increase in urban crime and staffing shortages.
The Austin Police Department posted a graphic in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, to urge residents to call 311 or make an online report if they’re robbed – 311 is a number usually used for non-emergency requests, as opposed to 911.
“Even if you are cautious & follow all the safety advice, you may still become the unfortunate victim of a robbery,” the Austin Police Department wrote on X. “Do you know what your next steps should be?”
“Make a police report & provide as much information as possible so we can recover your property quickly and safely,” the post added. The graphic included advice to mention the bank in the 311 report and include the date and time of the cash withdrawal.
The new protocol comes as the Texas capital grapples with an increase in crime. Compared to 2020, Austin has had a 77% increase in auto thefts, an 18% increase in aggravated assaults and a 30% increase in murders.
Thanks, Mayor Adler!
Austin Police Association President Thomas Villarreal told “Fox & Friends” in August that the department is sorely lacking the resources it needs to tackle crime.
“We’re a growing city, a city that should be up around 2,000 officers and growing right now,” Villarreal said. “I’ve got about 1,475 officers in our police department and, you know, we’re moving in the wrong direction. There’s less and less and less resources to go out and do the job.”
The understaffing is a direct result of the defunding effort. The defunding effort is a direct result of Austin’s hard-left, Democratic Party, Social Justice Warrior City Council’s ideology, and their desire to rake off the money for the hard left.
Without serious efforts to start and graduate more cadet classes every year, the understaffing (and the resulting crime hikes) will continue indefinitely.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
Tags: 911, Austin, Austin City Council, Austin Police Department, Crime, Democrats, police, Social Justice Warriors, Thomas Villarreal
I got a feeling that Rustler’s Justice is going to make a comeback. You’re there and we’re not. Hang them and be done with it.
The victims really ought to be filing class action lawsuits against the “defund the police” types, and bankrupting their sorry asses.
Make ’em pay. That’s the only way they’ll stop with this BS… Hold them responsible, make them pay for their stupidity, and make damn sure it hurts.
They really ought to be doing the same thing to everyone on the lawfare side of things, that go out of their way to get obvious criminals released. Sue the shit out of them for what those criminals did, and establish a legal precedent that if you act to reduce the punishment of someone, you’re responsible for their further depradations.
BigFire said, “I got a feeling that Rustler’s Justice is going to make a comeback.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy
There was a time before the internet became widespread in the Ozarks, and outside Las Vegas, and at car-crushing locations in Los Angeles County when chronic a**holes just disappeared and nobody spoke about them again.
I think fondly of those times now.
The Left gets what it votes for, good and hard.
I know people in Austin, whom I’ve long considered friends, but my affection for them wanes as they become ever-more Woke. I don’t wish ill on them, but I have less and less sympathy since they very much support these insane policies.
They did the same thing in Minneapolis about 10 years ago, but sent flyers in the sewer/garbage/water-bill instead of Twitter/X. Basically, if the thieves weren’t there you were just supposed to log onto a (horribly buggy) web site to get your “police report number” so that you could file a claim with your insurance company.
The beginning of this was in 2008 when they made the owners (the victims) of property that had suffered graffiti vandalism into (quite literally) criminals when it whenever the graffiti was reported. From the way reports of graffiti dropped you’d have figured the city had none.
It is my belief that the Marxists are doing this quite deliberately in the hope that some people will take vigilante actions and then use that as a further excuse to try to disarm honest people. I for one no longer live in the Soviet Socialist State of Minnesota.
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“I got a feeling that Rustler’s Justice is going to make a comeback . . ”
No, it won’t. This is driven by (Republican supported) mass immigration over the last 40 years, virtual open borders, it’s policy from the top, and it’s a permanent result. We’ll simply degenerate into a high crime, low trust, society like [any South or Central American hellhole] or South Africa and you’ll just cringe down and take it. Fantasizing about vigilante justice is just another cope from conservatives who are too gutless to confront the real problem, too gas lit by the system to admit, even on anonymous internet forums, that mass immigration has been a civilization destroying disaster. The system will crack down on vigilantes, it won’t do anything about the root cause, the fragmentation of society caused by mass immigration, because that is a fundamental moral tenet of its existence.