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.
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:
As part of our public safety reporting policy @statesman does not publish vague descriptions of possible suspects.
At this time, information provided by police of a possible shooter falls into this category and could perpetuate stereotypes and put innocent individuals at risk.
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.”
Here’s an excerpt from an interview Joe Rogan did with Austin mayor Steve Adler:
How many lies can you spot? Here are a few.
Before they repealed the camping ban: “I had more and more neighborhood associations complaining about more and more encampments, and I had no solution to that.”
Of course you did. You and the city council could have let Austin police enforce the law and either cleared homeless encampments and/or arrested people for breaking the law. That would have prodded the sturdiest beggars to move on to greener pastures. But the city council wouldn’t let APD enforce the law because there was no money to rake off to leftwing activists as part of the homeless industrial complex.
So instead you made the problem ten times worse.
His claim that “90-95% success rate” for “housing first” curing the problem is absolute garbage. Mentally-ill, drug-using transients don’t become magically sane or drug free because they’re in a hotel on the taxpayers dime.
“Smaller cities than Austin have 3-6x the amount of homelessness.” So that’s why you imported west coast policies to Austin? So you can increase the size of the homeless population like they did? If so, mission accomplished.
“They told me the same thing as San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.” Oh, so you sought advice from the cities with the worst homeless problems and the most obvious failed policies that made the problem worse! Genius!
When he says that the “overwhelming majority” of the current transient population are “from here,” either he’s lying or his staff is. A good two-thirds of the current homeless population seem to have come from out of town. And they’re not coming from “the areas immediately around us,” they’re coming from Houston and the Metroplex so they can do drugs and sleep in the street and not be arrested.
“We needed to get people off the streets.” Yeah, that’s why you turned every park and overpass into Bumsville: To get them off the street. Pull the other one.
“If all they’re doing is surviving…” And by “surviving,” he means “shooting up heroin in public.”
And note throughout the newly-minted PC neologism “people experiencing homelessness,” which I’m sure focus groups much better than “drug addicted transients” and “gibbering street lunatics.”
Also, that veterans program isn’t the shining success that Adler is making it out to be. According to a friend that applied for veteran housing, there was a nine month wait, so they put your name on a list, and if you couldn’t accept right then (say, you had just signed a lease), your name went right back to the bottom of the list.
I suspect the rest of the interview would offer up a lot more lies to flag…
The Biden Recession blooms, Bibby bombs, Baltimore burns, inscrutable Flu Manchu somehow infects the vaccinated, and Canada’s institutional religious hostility inflicts its revenge on the pastor that defied them. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
If inflation wasn’t enough to remind you of Biden’s reboot of That 70’s Show, how about long gas lines? An east coast gas pipeline was shut down by ransomeware attack launched by a hacking group called DarkSide.
Rendered with the magic of dyslexia
We’re actually very fortunate that a for-profit gang carried out this hack, rather than a terrorist group or state actor.
Seeing some reports stating that Israeli ground forces entered Gaza, but seeing some Twitter commentary that, no, they haven’t entered, but that IDF artillery and tanks are pounding Hamas tunnels.
Two weeks ago Turkish forces launched a military assault in the Duhok region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Villagers were forced to ‘flee in terror’ from raining bombs. It was only the latest bombardment of the beleaguered Kurds by Turkey, NATO member and Western ally. It did not trend online. There were no noisy protests in London or New York. The Turks weren’t talked about in woke circles as crazed, bloodthirsty killers. Tweeters didn’t dream out loud about Turks burning in hell. The Onion didn’t do any close-to-the-bone satire about how Turkish soldiers just love killing children. No, the Duhok attack passed pretty much without comment.
But when Israel engages in military action, that’s a different story. Always. Every time. Anti-Israel fury in the West has intensified to an extraordinary degree following an escalation of violence in the Middle East in recent days. Protests were instant and inflammatory. Israeli flags were burned on the streets of London. Social media was awash with condemnation. ‘IDF Soldier Recounts Harrowing, Heroic War Story Of Killing 8-Month-Old Child’, tweeted The Onion, to tens of thousands of likes. Israel must be boycotted, isolated, cast out of the international community, leftists cried. Western politicians, including Keir Starmer, rushed to pass judgement. ‘What’s the difference?’, said a placard at a march in Washington, DC showing the Israeli flag next to the Nazi flag. The Jews are the Nazis now, you see. Ironic, isn’t it?
This is the question anti-Israel campaigners have never been able to answer: why do they treat Israel so differently to every other nation on Earth? Why is it child-killing bloodlust when Israel takes military action but not when Turkey or India do? Why must we rush to the streets to set light to the Israel flag but never the Saudi flag, despite Saudi Arabia’s unconscionable war on Yemen? Why is it only ‘wrong’ or at worst ‘horrific’ when Britain or America drop bombs in the Middle East but Nazism when Israel fires missiles into Gaza? Why do you merely oppose the military action of some states but you hate Israel, viscerally, publicly, loudly?
The judgement and treatment of Israel by a double standard is one of the most disturbing facets of global politics in the 21st century. That double standard has been glaringly evident over the past few days. Israel is now the only country on Earth that is expected to allow itself to be attacked. To sit back and do nothing as its citizens are pelted with rocks or rockets. How else do we explain so many people’s unwillingness to place the current events in any kind of context, including the context of an avowedly anti-Semitic Islamist movement – Hamas – firing hundreds of missiles into civilian areas in Israel? In this context, to rage solely against Israel, to curse its people and burn its flag because it has sent missiles to destroy Hamas’s firing positions in Gaza, is essentially to say: ‘Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?’
Last year, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei admitted for the first time that his country was supplying the Palestinian terrorist groups with weapons. “Iran realized Palestinian fighters’ only problem was lack of access to weapons,” Khamenei said in an online speech.
“With divine guidance and assistance, we planned, and the balance of power has been transformed in Palestine, and today the Gaza Strip can stand against the aggression of the Zionist enemy and defeat it.”
Khamenei went on to offer the reason why Iran was sending rockets, missiles and tons of explosives to the Gaza Strip: “The Zionist regime is a deadly, cancerous tumor in the region. It will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.”
Khamenei’s admission shows how the mullahs in Tehran have been lying to the West for many years. In 2011, Mohammad Khazaee, the Permanent Representative of Iran to the United Nations, sent a letter to the President of the United Nations Security Council in which he vehemently denied that Iran was smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip.
Baltimore was one of the first cities to try “de-policing.” How did that work out for it? Not so hot:
This experiment has been an abject failure. Since 2011, nearly 3,000 Baltimoreans have been murdered—one of every 200 city residents over that period. The annual homicide rate has climbed from 31 per 100,000 residents to 56—ten times the national rate. And 93 percent of the homicide victims of known race over this period were black.
Remarkably, Baltimore is reinforcing its de-policing strategy. State’s Attorney for Baltimore Marilyn Mosby no longer intends to prosecute various “low-level” crimes. Newly elected mayor Brandon Scott promises a five-year plan to cut the police budget. Both justify their policies by asserting that the bloodbath on city streets proves that policing itself “hasn’t worked”; they sell their acceleration of de-policing as a “fresh approach” and “re-imagining” of law enforcement.
The tried “broken windows” policing without understanding it:
The motivation for de-policing traces to the city’s botched response to an earlier crime epidemic in the 1990s, when it averaged 45 homicides per 100,000 population, up 55 percent from the previous decade. So in 1999 Baltimoreans elected a mayor, Martin O’Malley, who promised to apply New York’s successful crime-fighting approach, where homicides had plunged by two-thirds over the decade (to one-ninth Baltimore’s rate) thanks to an expanded police force and innovative, proactive policing strategies.
O’Malley’s first commissioner, NYPD veteran Ed Norris, initially showed promise. By 2002, Baltimore’s homicide rate was 20 percent below its 1999 level. As O’Malley pressed for more, however, relations soured, and Norris departed (and some financial shenanigans eventually earned him a stint in federal prison). His successor, Kevin Clark, another NYPD import, also became embroiled in personal and professional controversy; he was fired and succeeded by a Baltimore PD holdover. By the time O’Malley moved to the Maryland governor’s mansion in 2007, Baltimore’s homicide rate was back to its 1990s average.
The problem was not just turmoil among BPD leadership and meddling (or worse) by O’Malley, but a fatal misunderstanding of what had worked in New York. There, the broad spectrum of criminal activity was addressed efficiently and with community engagement. Detailed data helped guide resources to crime hot spots. Chief William J. Bratton implemented the Broken Windows theory-inspired community-policing methods pioneered by social scientists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, who understood how small manifestations of disorder could grow to larger ones. Minor offenses that made residents feel unsafe or hinted at acceptance of violence were addressed in order to improve quality of life, strengthen communities, and prevent serious crime.
In Baltimore, however, Broken Windows was misunderstood and misapplied. It mutated into a malignant variant, “zero tolerance” policing—and BPD conduct became not just intolerant but unfocused and excessive. As David Simon, a veteran Baltimore crime reporter and creator of HBO’s The Wire, summed things up, O’Malley “tossed the Fourth Amendment out a window and began using the police department to sweep the corners and rowhouse stoops and [per Norris] ‘lock up damn near everyone.’” That sometimes even included Wire crew members on their way home from a long day of filming.
True Broken Windows policing, in Kelling’s words, creates “a negotiated sense of order in a community” and involves collaboration between cops and residents. As one BPD vet put it, “You go to a community—before we come in, [we should ask], ‘What are the main things you all can’t stand?’ Everybody playing music at 11:30 at night, kids sitting on the corner, the prostitutes using the little park over there to work their trade. Now, ‘What don’t you care about?’ See the old guys sitting down at the corner playing cards every night? They could stay there all they want. . . . Then the police come in and do what the neighborhood wants. You just don’t go out and lock everybody up.” But, he concluded, “we went overboard.”
Then they adjusted:
O’Malley’s successor, Sheila Dixon (the city’s first female and third black mayor), defied her staff’s recommendations and named as commissioner Frederick Bealefeld, a BPD lifer with no college pedigree. “It was something in my gut that felt he was the best person,” Dixon explained. “I could just feel his passion.”
Bealefeld understood community policing better than the New York imports, addressing disorder and crime efficiently. He attended community meetings tirelessly to find out what residents wanted done; got cops out of their cars and walking patrols more often; invested in better training; and supported cops’ work with kids. Partnering with a savvy federal prosecutor, Rod Rosenstein, he targeted known dealers and shooters, emphasizing quality arrests—including of cops on the take. It worked. Even as arrest totals fell (to 70,000 by 2010), so did the homicide rate, to a low of 31 per 100,000 residents by 2011.
And then the Social Justice started:
Dixon had embezzled gift cards meant for the poor—petty corruption is a Baltimore tradition—and in 2010 was succeeded by Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. The Oberlin-educated former public defender was more liberal than Dixon, personally lukewarm to Bealefeld, and sympathetic to those embittered by O’Malley’s “zero tolerance” policies. And she faced budget problems. De-policing, then, seemed to tick all the right boxes—and, with the homicide rate at a 23-year low (though still almost seven times the national average), there would be little outcry against it.
First came some defunding, with a 2 percent pay cut to help address a recession-related budget pinch; cops’ contributions to their pension funds also were raised to help address shortfalls there. The new mayor’s first proposed budget actually cut the BPD’s request by 10 percent, though the difference eventually was split. Demoralized, experienced cops started retiring in numbers.
Rawlings-Blake did not replace them, and she trimmed staffed aggressively. BPD budgets had consistently authorized about 3,900 positions through the O’Malley and Dixon years. Rawlings-Blake took that down by 5 percent in her 2012 budget and another 6 percent in 2013. Bealefeld called the cuts “unconscionable” and retired. As he’d told the head of the police union at one point, “you can only beat down your horses for so long before they give up.”
So even before Freddie Gray died in police custody in 2015 and Baltimoreans rioted, the BPD had 460 fewer budgeted “horses” than under Mayor Dixon—with 300 fewer on patrol, conducting investigations, or targeting violent criminals. Not surprisingly, the homicide rate surged 20 percent by 2013. And after the city’s newly elected prosecutor, Mosby, criminally charged six uniformed officers in Gray’s death—though she failed to convict any—proactive policing essentially ceased. The city’s annual body count jumped and has remained tragically high since.
Speaking of defunding the police, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey admits that defunding the police was a huge mistake. If only the rest of the Minneapolis had realized this before all the deaths.
Just about everything they told us about transmission vectors for Mao Tze Lung was wrong:
Bars, gyms and restaurants. Those were just a few settings health experts warned could become hotbeds for COVID-19 spread as states began reopening in the spring and summer of 2020 following the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.
Yet, public data analyzed by ABC News appears to tell a different story. The data from states across the country suggests specific outbreak settings (including bars, gyms, restaurants, nail salons, barbershops and stores — for the full list, see graphic below in story) only accounted for a small percentage, if any, of new outbreaks after the pandemic’s inital wave in 2020.
Snip.
Based on ABC News’ analysis of public data of all coronavirus cases in four states and D.C., the outbreak settings accounted for less than 5% of all COVID-19 cases in those states.
“World’s Most Vaccinated Nation Sees Active COVID Cases Double In Under A Week.” Mysterious uptick in the Seychelles.
Dave Hunt represented Clackamas County in the Oregon House of Representatives from 2003 through 2013. Hunt was the former Democratic Leader, Majority Leader, and Speaker of the House for the State of Oregon. As a legislator, Hunt the sponsor of a bill criminalizing sex trafficking in 2007. Hunt is currently a lobbyist working to influence the very chamber he left.
However, even more ironic in 2011, Dave Hunt use his position to support and vote for HB 2714. That bill created the crime of commercial sexual solicitation, the exact crime police used to charge Hunt when he was arrested and cited.
Sort of sounds like a garden variety prostitution solicitation charge. But if he’s one of the legislators to redefine that as “sex trafficking,” my sympathy is extremely limited.
NRA’s bankruptcy petition has been dismissed. Understandably, since it seemed a transparent ploy to begin with. It’s too bad Wayne LaPierre seems intent on dragging the NRA down with him…
Mark Sebu follows up on the Kentucky Ballistics explosion. Evidently it would haven taken 161,520 PI to shear the threads off the Sebu RN 50. Also, there were no pre-cuts on the sabot, suggesting it may indeed have been a counterfeit SLAP round that caused the explosion.
Not the Babylon Bee: O.J. Simpson backs Liz Cheney, accuses the Republican Party of “dishonesty.” I don’t feel I can adequately parody this real-life event, even though I should probably take a stab at it…
Top Gear/Grand Tour presenter James May found out that trickle charging a Tesla S’ main car battery didn’t charge the ordinary car battery, the one responsible for regular electric systems…like unlocking the hood latch to reach the same battery. Result: an hour of work just to reach the dead battery.
Speaking of impractical automotive accoutrements, here’s a Bugatti watch with a “working” W16 engine, yours for a mere $280,000…
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! The Biden economy kicks in, China behaves badly (again), and rock stars are fed up with woke. Let’s lead off with this weird photo people have been taking about all week:
How did you make the Carters look like tiny puppets?
Puppet people aside, what better image for the week in which Biden seems to be bringing stagflation back?
If you were wondering when the Trump boom would end and the Biden bust begin, it just did:
U.S. job growth for the month of April fell far below what experts had predicted, as data reported Friday showed an increase of 266,000 jobs, versus an estimate of 1 million — the largest miss relative to expectations since at least 1998.
Economists had suggested a positive outlook for the report, with the White House hoping for a gain of at least 700,000 jobs — making Joe Biden the first president ever to hit 2 million new jobs in his first 100 days. But expectations came crashing back to reality with data showing an overestimation of nearly 800,000 — the worst miss in decades.
The U.S. unemployment rate rose slightly from 6.0 percent to 6.1. March’s payroll gains were also revised downward by nearly 150,000 jobs, from an initial print of 916,000 to 770,000. Labor force participation rate rose slightly, to 61.7 percent.
Huh, irresponsible tax-and-spend policies, rampant inflation and paying people not to work evidently aren’t a recipe for economic success. Who knew?
Speaking of inflation, it looks like it’s back, baby! Rising metal, oil, and ag commodity prices all point to inflation. “Wood prices are at an all-time high at over $1,370 per 1,000 board feet.”
Biden Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm owns stock in “Proterra, an electric vehicle company that is being actively promoted by the Biden administration. Further, Granholm being the Secretary of Energy means she gets to make regulations that can directly enrich herself.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Joe Biden said today, “Most people don’t know: you walk into a store and you buy a gun, but you go to a gun show you can buy whatever you want and no background check.”
This isn’t even close to being true. In fact, gun shows are subject to the same rules as apply everywhere else, which are that:
commercial transfers require federal background checks, but that
private transfers only require federal background checks if they are conducted within one of the thirteen states that superintend non-commercial firearms transactions
There are no special rules for gun shows. The same set of laws applies to them as applies to, say, your kitchen table: If you are in the business of selling guns, you are federally obliged to run a check. If you are not, you are not — unless your state requires you to. That’s it. There’s no “loophole” here, and nothing about gun shows that separates them from the broader debate about private sales.
A new poll from ABC and the Washington Post published on Wednesday found a significant drop in support for new gun-control laws, especially among young people.
The number of Americans supporting enacting new gun laws over protecting gun rights fell from 57 percent to 50 percent, a seven-point drop from when the poll was last conducted in 2018. The number of Americans favoring gun rights jumped from 34 to 43 percent, a nine-point jump. The difference between the two positions narrowed by 16 points overall.
The sharpest decline in support for new gun-control measures came among 18 to 29-year-olds and Hispanics. Both groups saw a 20 percent drop. Rural Americans and strong conservatives saw a 17-point drop.
Worker shortage is so acute that a Tampa MacDonald’s is paying people $50 just to interview for a job. “Some 17 million Americans remain on jobless benefits. Perhaps many of these people want jobs but are getting paid more to sit on the couch.”
How Michael Dell used several financial maneuvers to turn $3.6 billion into more than $50 billion.
The Who’s frontman Roger Daltry says that the woke are ruining the world. “It’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves. I mean, anyone who’s lived a life and you see what they’re doing, you just know that it’s a route to nowhere.”
And Daltry wasn’t the only rock star calling BS on the woke. Also taking aim: punk rock icon John Lydon:
Johnny Rotten blames ‘wokeness’ for US ‘collapse’
Sex Pistols’ frontman Johnny Lydon had some rotten things to say about “wokeness.”
In a recent profile with the Times UK, the aging punk rocker decried “cancel culture” and the activists who campaigned to tear down national monuments which they say promote historical racism. The statues include that of Winston Churchill, one of the UK’s most revered prime ministers.
He also blamed academia as well as the media for giving “the space” to “tempestuous spoilt children.”…
Addressing calls to tear down Churchill’s statue in London, Lydon dismissed criticism that the wartime prime minister was racist. However, critics point out that the leader once referred to Indians as “the beastliest people in the world next to Germans,” and thought that black people are “[not] as capable or as efficient as white people.”
“This man saved Britain,” Lydon asserted. “Whatever he got up to in South Africa or India beforehand is utterly irrelevant to the major issue in hand.”
If there are any bigger haters in history than today’s cancel culture, Lydon conceded, it’s the Nazis — and Churchill took care of that.
Florida “whistleblower” Rebekah Jones is a big fat liar. “NPR describes Jones as a ‘top scientist’ leading Florida’s pandemic response. In fact, Jones has held three jobs in her field; all three have ended in her being terminated and criminally charged.”
Just when I thought that America couldn’t possibly get any softer, people start suggesting that there’s a role for the police in preventing knife murders. The snowflake generation strikes once again.
Is there any tradition that the radicals won’t ruin? As the brilliant Bree Newsome pointed out on Twitter, “Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons.” And now people are calling the cops on them? I ask: Is this a self-governing country or not? When Newsome says, “We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon,” she may be expressing a view that is unfashionable these days. But she’s right.
Disappointingly, my colleague Phil Klein has felt compelled to join the critics. In a post published yesterday, Phil asked in a sarcastic tone whether the police should “somehow treat teenage knife fights as they would harmless roughhousing and simply ignore it.” My answer to this is: Yes, that’s exactly what they should do — yes, even if they are explicitly called to the scene. I don’t know where Phil grew up, but where I spent my childhood, Fridays were idyllic: We’d play some football, try a little Super Mario Bros, have a quick knife fight, and then fire up some frozen pizza before bed. And now law enforcement is getting involved? This is political correctness gone mad.
It’s hypocrisy, too. Who among us hasn’t come within a second or two of murdering someone else with a steak knife? My best friend in school, Bobby “The Blade” Simpson, used to throw shivs at the smaller kids in the music room. Did we need the authorities to step in when that happened? No, we did not. As MSNBC’s Joy Reid argued smartly on her show last night, pranks such as these were dealt with by our teachers — just as we all expected they would be. And if something went wrong? Well, that’s why we had substitutes.
In all honesty, I worry that this sort of helicopter policing is making us weak. Back in my day, the people who survived a good stabbing came out stronger for it. I learned a lot of lessons from my time in the ring: self-reliance, how to overcome fear, the importance of agility, the basics of military field dressing. And, given the turnover, I also learned how to make new friends.
Sad news (and possibly foul play). “University of Texas linebacker Jake Ehlinger, the younger brother of former Longhorns quarterback Sam Ehlinger, was found dead Thursday.”
In a rebuke over a year in the making, the Texas House of Representatives gave initial approval to a statewide ban on homeless camping — aimed tacitly, if not directly, at the City of Austin’s near-two-year experiment in public camping.
House Bill (HB) 1925 by Rep. Giovanni Capriglione (R-Southlake) passed on second reading by a vote of 85 to 56 on Wednesday. Eight Democratic members voted with Republicans in support of the bill. They were Reps. Rafael Anchía (D-Dallas), Ryan Guillen (D-Rio Grande City), Abel Herrero (D-Robstown), Tracy King (D-Uvalde), Eddie Lucio (D-Brownsville), Terry Meza (D-Irving), Richard Peña Raymond (D-Laredo), and John Turner (D-Dallas).
Interesting that such a significant number of Hispanic Democrats back the ban.
“I want to be clear,” Capriglione said while laying out his bill, “this bill does not criminalize homelessness.”
Rep. Vikki Goodwin (D-Austin) stated in opposition, “I hate the homeless problem in Austin, but this bill does nothing to solve the root problem.”
The legislation revokes grant funding for any city that violates its provision and tasks the attorney general with seeking injunctive relief against an offending city.
Opponents objected — echoing the city council’s original justification for rescinding the ban in the first place — saying the policy would burden homeless individuals with fines they cannot pay.
An amendment clarifying that recreational camping in public parks and beach access plan campsites are exempt was tacked onto the bill.
However, some of the bill’s opposition was successful with tacking on amendments. One successful amendment was a requirement that officers notify the homeless individual about alternative housing, “if reasonable and appropriate” contact a government official or non-profit organization representative, and provide information on human trafficking.
Others included allowing a homeless individual arrested to secure their personal property and a specific carve-out for camping on the property of a homeless shelter.
Snip.
HB 1925 must pass another House vote before moving to the other chamber. The bill was on the floor last week, but was recommitted to committee after a valid point of order was called.
The equivalent Senate Bill, SB987, still hasn’t passed committee.
No other Texas city has been as pigheadedly stupid as Austin in encouraging vast camps of drug-addicted transients, but with a statewide ban, hopefully no other Texas city will ever have to go through what Austin has the last two years.
You expect Austin voters to embrace crazy leftwing policies, but turning every grassy median and underpass in the city into a garbage-strewn 24/7 amusement park for drug-addicted transients (with side order of arson and mayhem) was too much even for them, and yesterday they reinstated the camping ban. Proposition B passed 85,830 (57.13%) to 64,409 (42.87%). It’s a grave blow to Austin Mayor Steve Adler, City Councilman Greg Casar, the homeless industrial complex, and a number of random drug dealers.
Other May 1st Voting results:
Proposition F, which would turn Austin in a “strong mayor” form of government (i.e., let Adler control spending more directly instead of a City Manager) was overwhelmingly defeated, 126,847 (85.91%) to 20,810 (14.09%).
Proposition G (adding another city council district) was defeated more narrowly, 83,092 (56.58%) to 62,702 (43.42%).
Proposition H, to give every voter two $25 vouchers to contribute to political campaigns (i.e., another way to pass taxpayer money to leftwing politicians) was defeated 83,092 to 63,809.
All the other propositions passed, including Proposition E (ranked choice voting), which is illegal under Texas law.
The twerp could not be more out of touch with Austin. He needs to spend less time blabbing like your standard raging Marxist and start listening to the citizens of Austin who want nothing to do with his hate and ineptitude. https://t.co/ubpzdy9GKl
A devastating night for the legacy of @MayorAdler.
From winning re-election by 40 points…to staking his entire second term on the homeless issue by eliminating all rules….to watching the ban being reinstated in a landslide.
Casar is taking some big losses tonight…Prop B, Socialist Dollars, and Strong Mayor all looking like they, like his influence, is going down the proverbial dumpster fire.
Major victories today in #ATX. @MayorAdler and @GregCasar can finally shove it talking about how Austinites "wanted" that ban lifted years ago. They didn't then & they've spoken now. Love seeing Greg get put in his place on several items. #PropB@Austin_Networkhttps://t.co/WA8VmcR6Rg
The execution of the camping ban is going to be a shitshow. ATX council is going to throw endless amounts of tax dollars to try to house everyone and increase taxes. This was their plan all along. Our next fight is going to be to stop the homeless industry and non profit grift.
If you live in the Austin City Limits and haven’t voted yet, go vote for Proposition B today. Travis County Voting locations are here, while Williamson County voting locations can be looked up here.
Voters finally have a chance to undo Steve Adler and the Austin City Council’s bumsville madness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
The 911 call says they took EVERYTHING in the jewelry store
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:
I thought Jimmy Flannigan and the Texas Tribune said it was Abbott lifting the mask mandate causing all these businesses to cancel their conventions to Austin? pic.twitter.com/DwtDVSWUzA
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:
Here @MayorAdler is engaging in a time-honored rhetorical device known as "lying his ass off."
“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”
HAPPENING NOW: “Don’t Austin our Williamson County!” —Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell, is speaking at a protest outside of the Candlewood Suites. Gravell says Mayor Adler didn’t call him about purchasing the hotel to house the homeless. @KVUEpic.twitter.com/4l6d1JOARm
First-hand evidence of sex trafficking among the Adlervilles, and how no government entity would help:
#SB987, Texas statewide ban on public camping #txlege Texas Senate Committee meeting / Austin open camping Sex trafficking/drugs in homeless encampments Testimony #2
#SB987, Texas statewide ban on public camping #txlege Texas Senate Committee meeting / Austin open camping Sex trafficking/drugs in homeless encampments Testimony #2
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.
Florida and Texas gained House seats while California and New York lost one seat each as a result of population shifts, according to the 2020 census results announced on Monday.
Texas gained two House seats in the census apportionment for a new total of 38 congressional districts, while Florida gained one House seat, bringing its total number of districts to 28. California lost one House seat and will decline to 52 congressional districts, while New York also lost one House seat and will now have 26 congressional districts. Those four states are the nation’s most populous and together provide one-third of the House’s total seats.
A census official noted that if New York had counted 89 more people, the state would not have lost a House seat.
Too bad Andrew Cuomo killed off all those old people before they could be counted.
The population of California stopped growing several years before the coronavirus pandemic, and in 2020 the state lost more residents to outmigration than it gained. Residents have migrated to Texas as well as to neighboring states such as Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon.
Once again, blue states lost population and red states gained population. People flee Democratic governance and its symptomatic poverty, high taxes, crime and disorder. It’s also the first time California has lost a congressional seat ever.
With two new congressional seats to play with, how will Texas Republicans approach redistricting? I am very far indeed from a redistricting guru, but I have a few educated guesses about how they’ll approach things:
Obviously, they’ll try to carve out two more Republican districts, but that may prove difficult. Expect a new Metroplex-area suburban/exurban Republican majority district, but don’t be surprised if they have to create another Hispanic majority district for Democrats somewhere.
The next-highest priority has to be taking back the two seats lost in 2018, AKA The Year of Beto. Both the 7th (John Culberson losing to Lizzie Fletcher) and the 32nd (Pete Sessions losing to Collin Allred) were typical sleepwalking incumbents caught by end of election cycle demographic shifts, but there’s no reason those districts can’t be redrawn to make them Republican majority districts again. Republican challenger Wesley Hunt only lost by 3% in the 7th in 2020. (Sessions carpetbagged his way into the Waco-based 17th.)
Next up would be protecting Republican incumbents whose current districts are starting to get purple. To that end, I would guess that the 2nd District, with Dan Crenshaw, a rising national star regarded as a solid team player (as newly minted congressmen Beth Van Duyne and August Pfluger can attest) in a district that’s only R+5, would be the top candidate for shoring up. Van Duyne’s 24th (R+2) and Chip Roy’s 21st (R+5) would be next. John Carter’s 31st (R+6) is starting to get purple as well, but since he’s 79, he may not get as much consideration as other incumbents. Michael McCaul’s 10th (R+5) would be another candidate, but as one of the richest incumbents, there might be sentiment that he can stand fast without much additional help. Van Taylor’s 3rd (R+6) looks like a candidate on paper, but neither he nor previous Republican incumbent Sam Johnson ever won by less than 10 points.
A separate issue than the above, due to different dynamics, is what to do about the 23rd. The only true swing district in Texas over the last decade is currently held by Republican Tony Gonzalez, who defeated Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones by 4% in 2020. Despite having a giant target on his back every time, Republican Will Hurd held the seat for three cycles before retiring despite never breaking 50%. The fate of the 23rd is highly dependent on whether they decide to carve out another majority Hispanic Democratic district for San Antonio, or whether they want to…
Make a play for the Rio Grande Valley? One of the more surprising results of 2020 was that Republicans made significant inroads into the Valley, including President Donald Trump winning Democrat Henry Cueller’s 28th outright. Part of this is due to Trump’s increasing popularity among Hispanics, but the Texas Republican Party has been pouring significant resources into the Valley. Combined with Biden’s border crisis, all this adds up to an opportunity to pick up one or more seats through redistricting. Michael Cloud’s adjacent 27th is looking pretty safe, so the temptation will be to turn one or more of the 28th, Vicente Gonzalez’s 15th (D+3) and/or Filemon Vela Jr.’s 34th (D+5) into competitive swing districts.
Another issue will be what the hell to do with Austin, the blue tumor in the heart of red Texas. One driving rationale for the shape of the 35th district (running from Austin down I-35 to San Antonio) was trying to knock off Democratic incumbent Lloyd Doggett by forcing him to face off against a San Antonio-based Hispanic Democrat. That failed, and Doggett won handily. It’s going to be mighty tempting for Republicans to throw in the towel and fashion a liberal urban core district for Austin to free up redder suburban areas to shore up Republican incumbents.
I can see one approach solution that solves a lot of those problems: an urban Austin district, a new majority Hispanic district near San Antonio, and a new majority Hispanic district huddling the Rio Grande Valley, reinforcing the 23rd and turning two of the 15th, 28th and 34th into majority Republican districts. But the fact it is obvious means that it probably won’t come to pass, with the likely result a more sophisticated (i.e., gerrymandered) solution.
