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Austin Voters Ratified Defunding Their Own Police Department. But Why?
At risk of being overlooked amidst the general (and most welcome) celebration of conservative victories last night is the glaring defeat of Proposition A in Austin, which would have restored $120 million in police funding that the city council eliminated last year during the ‘defund the police’ mania.
With great effort, and after a failed earlier attempt, a local non-profit collected enough signatures to qualify the measure for the November ballot. It was carefully drafted to appeal to voters across the political spectrum and to address criticisms that have been leveled, rightly or wrongly, at police departments across the country.
According to the nonprofit that sponsored Prop A, Austin’s murder rate increased 300% this year and property crimes increased by double digits. My local Nextdoor and Ring app feeds seem to show a steadily increasing and ever more aggressive wave of property crime including armed robbery nearby and I have to think that’s a common experience around Austin now.
Yet Prop A failed yesterday with a whopping 69% opposed.
Though I’ve lived among leftists of various stripes my entire life, in family, personal, educational, and professional surroundings, I just can’t get my head around the mindset that says the problems of crime and incarceration are caused by law enforcement and can be improved by gutting local law enforcement budgets.
Even in Minneapolis they aren’t that far gone, as the voters there demonstrated last night by soundly rejecting a ‘re-imagine the police’ amendment to the city charter.
There will always be crazies among us, apparently especially in blue-tinted cities, but how can such a large swath of the population succumb to that kind of thinking (or ‘thinking’)? What am I missing?
Published in Policing
Pittsburgh just implemented a similar civilian oversight board. It also requires diverse representatives from the ‘hood. I am sure they will understand the dynamics and issues confronting individual policeman and their actions as they encounter perps. Pittsburgh police now also have to categorize and document their level of interactions with the public based upon race and demographics. The intent is to statistically prove that cops are performing their duties in a way that is racist and oppressive. Well, the stated intent is to use the statistics for focused sensitivity training to prevent such systemic racism.
What could possibly go wrong, they have such good intentions?
Even Seattle generally rejected the left-most candidates on its ballot yesterday. And the Sawant recall is next month. Maybe if Davison (incoming City Attorney) isn’t hamstrung by a bunch of lefty judges, it will be possible to visit downtown Seattle again in a year or two without fearing for your life and property.
I guess someone could play Solomon, and cut them into parts.
I would rather see it burn. Seattle and its idiotic population is responsible for virtually all the garbage that the rest of this state is currently saddled with, and the faster it burns, the better. I don’t want Conservatives to swoop in and solve its problems, I want them to leave and take their business elsewhere in this state. Seattle can turn into an utterly destroyed haven for drug addicts, criminals, and leftist morons; we can build a wall around it and move on with our lives. The only thing better would be if we could take a hand-saw, Bugs-Bunny style, and literally push Seattle over to China, where its population would be far happier, anyway.
Very funny. Of course logic is not how this works. Every microscopic group gets a representative at the expense of the largest groups. Of course white men get no representation, despite being 35 or 40 % of the population. Most groups selected by “representative” numbers are either devoid of white men, or white men are significantly under-represented. My father noted this in university admissions as long ago as 40 years ago.
There’s a sure-fire way to mess with the chain-of-command and generate confusion in the ranks.
New tv show: Austin City Permits
Austin isn’t very large, and the center of it is dominated by the University of Texas, which is huge and has its own police force (not defunded), and by the Capitol, which has another security force. Austin is contiguous with Round Rock, which has its own police force, also. And there is also the county police (county land extends well into the city environs as unincorporated blogs and fingers), the state police, and the Texas Rangers, with jurisdiction everywhere in the state. The Austin Police can call on the Rangers to come in and help out if needed. So Austinites are pretty soundly backed up security wise whatever they do with the city police force. I doubt if people waiting for Austin to burn will get to roast their marshmallows.
You should see California.
People say the same thing about my town, as if abandoning one city after the other somehow results in a better country.
“We have to stop nation-building abroad, and concentrate on our own problems.”
“Okay. Like Seattle?”
“Nah, screw that place.”
“Chicago?”
“Nah, screw that place.”
“California?”
“Nah, screw that place.”
You can’t save a city that doesn’t want to save itself.
They would have to (re-)hire a bunch of cops who will be at least suspicious that they’ll still be thrown under the bus if they do anything “wrong,” if not immediately then maybe after the next election.
And in any case, Davison doesn’t control how much money is available for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if she gets “hamstrung” as you put it, and then voted out next time because she didn’t “fix things” that she didn’t have money or people to do. I even ran into that doing property management, it would really suck if you’re in charge of police etc.
Aren’t you mixing two groups there? Isn’t it the Left that wants to stop “wasting money overseas” (and in space) to “fix things here?” And the Right that says “screw that place” about Seattle, etc?
I expect it would have been quickly emptied by those same criminals.
I am all for fixing our local problems. Nation Building is a National thing, and local cities are a local thing. The two are not really connected any more than “We spend so much on Defense, could we spend less and do more over here?”.
The real complaint should be “We have to stop transfering wealth from the poorest cohort to the richest. “
Too bad. If the city won’t pay for police, it has no right to expect “backup” from those who do pay.
I’m not so certain, though, that it doesn’t. And the point is not that you are abandoning a city. Rather, the point is that you are allowing people to get what they voted for. I do not live in Seattle. I live in a town that is 2 hours away from Seattle, and the people here do not want to live the way people live in Seattle. Yet, the policies that Seattle adopts are inevitably enforced statewide. So, one way or another, we end up bearing the brunt of their bad decisions. I do not consider Seattle to be my problem. I left because I do not wish to live in such an environment. What I do want to happen is for people to learn their own lessons. I don’t think liberals are ever going to learn any lessons – if they were capable of learning lessons, they would not be liberals. But I do think that the vast middle may very well be convinced by actually witnessing a town that displays the fruits of its own policies, and in that vein, if the people of Seattle want socialism and crime, I think they should get it, and they should get it good and hard.
Do you think that the people of Minnesota are starting to wake up to the ridiculous excesses in places like Minneapolis? If so, do you think that they would wake up if things didn’t get really bad there?
Good point. I have never made the argument (and neither do most conservatives) that we should abandon foreign intervention (which is sometimes necessary) in order to “concentrate on our own problems.” I would argue that 99% of our own problems emanate from the attempts we make to “concentrate” on them. What we need to do is to let people solve their own problems and get our government as far away as humanly possible. Trust me – Seattle’s problems are not the result of not enough government action in Seattle. Quite the opposite.
I don’t get it. No police force in the nation is autonomous. They all get budgets and policies and procedures from the city government. Why is it that people blame cops for doing what their bosses tell them to do?
Maybe that’s part of why these city councils etc are cutting police funding and so forth: so they don’t get blamed for what the police did before, and can take credit for “fixing” it now. At least until the people in the cities see how much worse it gets WITHOUT police.
I’m not sure what you would prefer here.
I suppose I disagree with your characterization of “abandoning one city after another”? Who is doing the abandoning? Democrat-run poop-hole cities eventually fail. I’d like to stop propping them up. That’s a foundational plank of our “laboratory of democracy” approach to a Republic. Federal cash should be tied to disasters which are both natural and which exceeded the scope of prudent preparations.
Why shouldn’t a place like New Orleans have emergency money tied to a “break-the-seal” consent decree: “You mismanaged your levees for decades and now we are (literally!) bailing you out. For the next fifty years your managament of levees will be overseen by a board of angry penny-pinching engineers.” They could always say no, after all.
This is not even about natural disasters. The democrat brownshirts have terrorized whole swathes of the country into voting against the rule of law. FINE. Let their cities burn. Otherwise, those local political establishments get to appease the worst at the expense of the rest. Nobody is “abandoning” these cities who didn’t live there first. Seattle and Chicago have earned their trouble. FAR BE IT FROM ME to deny them their reward. They’ve thrown their rule of law into the sewer, and they may not therefore have some of mine.
No what is happening now is the city is playing money games. I have watched this in local politics for years. You raise taxes to get police then you take it away for whatever reason. Now you have extra money for your little pet projects (graft). Crime goes up so you do not have money so you have to raise taxes again to address crime.
It is the same game they play with usually a bunch of “officer positions” that you can not fill in the police department. By law those positions are funded but at the end of the year if they are not filled they take the money back for their pet projects. If you go to local meetings and get in with these guys you see the games they play to get money and take money.
No. I’m not sure they’d wake up if things did get really bad there.
I doubt it too. Aren’t things really bad enough already?
It does seem like that’s what it takes – enough voters feeling enough pain. There are signs that Minneapolis voters are there, as they just rejected a proposed city charter amendment to ‘reimagine’ their police department.
In New York City, voters went through four years of high crime and chaos in the late 80s/early 90s that many laid at the feet of Mayor David Dinkins. Then they elected Rudy Giuliani, who took a hard line on crime and turned things around.
New Yorkers eventually forgot that lesson and elected Bill DeBlasio, who brought about the expected chaos. After 8 years and enough pain, they’ve just elected a new mayor who campaigned on public safety and reducing crime.
There’s hope, but you really don’t want to live in a city that’s in the midst of learning that painful lesson by experience. . .
Meanwhile, US citizens are being supplanted by a Stalin-esque ethnic resettlement program. It may not matter.
Not even in the midst, you don’t want to live there at all, since it comes and goes.
Well, To the original post question, why do they vote that way? Perhaps because there are huge forces promoting that line of thought and vote. Why do these places also vote in DA’s who refuse to prosecute criminals? Same huge forces promoting them. Meet the huge force George Soros