Austin, Texas Murder Rate Reaches New High Thanks To Defunding the Police

The homicide rate in the city of Austin, Texas, has skyrocketed to a record high as the Austin Police Department tries to deal with it while suffering a shrinking number of police officers.

Sixty homicides have hit the city this year, so car, according to KVUE and though that’s a weekend in racist Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago, but for Austin, that’s the most homicides the city has seen in 61 years.

According to the outlet, for the next highest number you have to go back to 1984 when 59 homicides hit the city during a three-year surge. There were thirty-five homicides in 2018, thirty-eight in 2019, and forty-eight in 2020. Do you see a pattern? And it is all self-inflicted by woke politicians who want to appease loud mouth Progressive rabble rousers.

The new record high was set on Sunday when two homicides were committed about 2:20 AM near a nightclub on North Lama Blvd when someone was shot to death. Not long after that, police got a call about a stabbing near Sixth and Nueces Streets.

The homicide rate went from 4.2 per 100,000 Austin residents in 2016 to 6.2 per 100,000 in 2021. That’s a real jump.

Eleven of the 60 cases are in an active investigation leaving forty-nine where charges have been filed.

“Experts attribute a number of reasons to the crime spike, which is also happening in other major U.S. cities. They say the availability of guns is contributing, as well as unrest and instability from the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to the outlet.

One major problem here is that the Austin police force is stretched very thin thanks to Progressive policies defunding the police budget, which is a real gut punch for police morale.

“Council members, by canceling Police Department cadet classes and stripping up to $150 million from the $434 million police budget, failed to anticipate the consequences,” the Austin American-Statesman wrote. “Several acknowledge that the department is now left with a bare-bones patrol staff suffering unprecedented attrition. The council has reinstated cadet classes, but the first graduates won’t hit the streets until spring. The department has about 1,800 officers, roughly the same number it had in 2016.”

Thanks to Progressive policies, Austin cops are not responding to calls that are deemed as non-emergencies. Calls coming in for animal services, burglaries, theft, verbal disputes, prostitution, and COVID violations are not being answered.

But not to worry, because the Progressives who run the city are telling Austin residents that for problems like your house has been robbed, instead of calling 911, they urge them to call 311 instead, so that they can file a report. WOW! They get to file a report.

This has definitely slowed down the whole crime-fighting thing. In one instance, it took police over a month to respond to a call.

According to KXAN-TV, it’s so bad in Austin that a man from North Carolina last month said his daughter was visiting Austin for a bachelorette party with her friends, and the house they were renting was robbed.

“They proceeded to call the police and were referred to 311, who instructed them to start an online report. And no law enforcement official arrived at the location,” Darin Short said. Sounds like Philadelphia during the Wilson Goode and Ed Rendell years.

According to Short, they didn’t hear back for weeks on end about the robbery, and they finally got a call last Wednesday, September 29, telling them that an officer should be contacting them within the next 48 hours or so. They made a phone call to tell them an officer would be contacting them.

Save Austin Now, a political action committee (PAC) started a push to get a proposition on the ballot for this year’s November election that will require two police officers for every 100,000 people in the city. That’s not a lot to ask.

In the Progressive dogfight for resources (read money) city leaders, activist groups, and other organizations griped about the proposition taking money away from their own pet causes and said the move would not make the city safer. Hmm, more cops on patrol won’t make the city safer? What are they smoking?

This is what happens when Progressive politicians cater to the criminal element and their kinfolk for political power. The world changed when George Floyd died of an overdose of fentanyl and the mobocracy blamed it on the Minneapolis Police, and then indicted all police throughout the country. Now, residents in many cities across the country are suffering from rising crime rates because the same politicians that let crime get out of control in their jurisdictions in the first place, at the expense of their police forces, are the ones who threw police under the bus to save their own hides. The people they represent are feeling the repercussions of political incompetence. Anyone who tells you differently is lying to you.