Despite being home to Tesla’s Gigafactory, the Democrat-controlled city of Austin, TX, is finding itself on the wrong and woefully underfunded side of law enforcement. Their leftist leadership has left the police department so underfunded that in February, sections of the city were left with no police officers for a few hours on a Saturday. Austin Police Association President Michael Bullock spoke with Fox News Digital about the issue.
“Previous councils and leadership have actively worked against our officers and department, which has now put us in a free-falling staffing crisis. Twice now we’ve had our contract voted down or it has been allowed to expire. Each year since 2017, we’ve lost more officers than we’ve hired. We had to gut our specialized units and force detectives to work backfill on patrol just to try and respond to 911 calls.”
Bullock added, “As a result, our staffing has been set back at least 15 years, and at the same time, we’ve dealt with a population growth of over 250,000 new residents. Combine that with a district attorney who has made it very clear that targeting officers and releasing criminals is his priority – not public safety.”
This kind of mentality saw 40 officers hand in retirement papers after a 9-2 vote in 2023 to void their four-year contract, and instead do a single-year contract at a substantially lower rate. A sign of abuse like this was more than the officers were willing to handle, and rightfully so. While TX state officials force this to change, the city has still kept its manning forces greatly reduced as the city continues to swell with new people moving in for the tech boom.
Austin’s way of policing is a sign of everything that is wrong with the leftist endorsement of the Black Lives Matter movement. They dismantled a perfectly good police department like Austin’s and said that it was racist. That it was offensive, and their departments like the anti-gang task force had to go. Removing the people who specifically targeted the criminal element was the most ignorant choice the city could make, yet they dove face-first into the idea.
While Austin now reaps what they have sown, this needs to be a painful wake-up call for the rest of conservative America.
