Austin Guts Police Budget to Fund Abortion, and Other Twists From America's Dying Cities

AP Photo/Eric Gay

Austin guts police budget to pay Planned Parenthood

The Austin City Council voted unanimously Thursday to gut its police budget. The Austin Police Department, which is already about 200 officers below full strength, will have its budget cut by one-third. The city’s murder rate is spiking but evidently that’s of no concern.

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The Austin City Council has chopped $150 million from the Austin Police Department‘s budget, roughly 34% of the department’s $434 million total budget.

The move comes after months of racial justice protests throughout the city, calling for defunding the police.

Going into Thursday’s budget discussions, the council was considering slashing the department’s $434 million budget by about a third, or $150 million. Nearly a fifth of that extra money, or $21 million, will go toward things such as violence prevention and permanent housing services. 

That’s a typical mainstream media report, in that it omits the consequences that will unfold from this heinous decision. The short version: Crime will increase and people will die.

So much for the Democrats’ mantra of “If it saves one life.”

Not only will defunding police get innocent people killed, but the city council doubled down on that: Some of the funds that would have been devoted to law enforcement will be diverted to cover abortion in the city.

The proposal to cut police funding by about one-third of its total $434 million budget calls for immediately cutting around $21.5 million from the department. This would include reallocating these funds to areas like violence prevention, food access, and abortion access programs.

Margaret Sanger, racist founder of Planned Parenthood, undoubtedly would approve.

In crass political terms, the Austin City Council has moved public funds from police, who tend to be conservative, over to abortionists, who tend to pour millions of dollars into Democrat campaigns.

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Austin’s mayor and city council evidently want the city to become Portland for the riots and Chicago for the weekend shooting sprees, turning Austin from weird to the wild west. Among the cuts, the council gutted the police department’s mounted patrol. That very unit broke up illegal street protests a couple of weekends ago, protests that reportedly aimed at taking over a chunk of downtown and turning it into one of those Seattle-style violent “autonomous zones.” Mounted police may not be around to stop the next one. So who will?

Here’s a clue: City Councilman Jimmy Flannigan literally urged police to just let the rioters take over the streets if they want to, during a recent council meeting after an illegal street protest turned deadly. Flannigan replaced the last Republican on the council when he won the seat, proving that elections do indeed have consequences. Flannigan has a Republican opponent in November — Mackenzie Kelly. She is running on a platform that includes supporting the police.

The Austin Police Association opposes the cuts, but they have no voice or advocate at City Hall at the moment. The mayor and council only listen to the far-left advocates who don’t think even this cut is enough. They don’t listen to business. They don’t listen to average citizens who contribute their taxes and build things. They just listen to the hardcore activists. The council tried to bully APD Chief Brian Manley into quitting. So far he’s staying put, but for how long? How long will any police officer in Austin stay on the job when the city’s top elected officials keep stabbing them in the back?

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So that’s Austin. It still has a ways to go to catch up to Seattle.

Austin Police Association Head Suggests Officers Stop ‘Active Enforcement’

The death of the Emerald City

Seattle was dying even before the pandemic ruined everything. That was the assessment of KOMO TV more than a year ago. The pandemic and the riots, and most importantly the city’s reaction to it all, have accelerated the Emerald City’s demise.

Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best resigned earlier this week after that city council gutted its police budget and slashed her salary. The hard Marxist left has won there. Now they’re just mopping up.

Best was both the city’s first black female police chief and the only adult in the room as Seattle’s elected officials turned the city over to riots. Best spent 28 years trying to keep Seattle safe. The city council didn’t even give her a gold watch on her way out. It’s too often the case that elected officials cannot abide real leadership when they see it. They recognize it, and they either hate it or fear it. So they remove it.

Best will presumably be replaced by someone more disposed to the city council’s Marxism and the radical advocates’ fondest utopian dreams. These are the people who, despite media lies to the contrary, really do mean abolishing police departments when they say “defund the police.” All the cuts they have approved to date are just a start. They really think social workers are the answer to all that ills us.

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These radicals consider Mayor Jenny “summer of love” Durkan not radical enough. So they’re trying to recall her and remove her from office. The state supreme court is allowing that effort to move forward.

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan asked the state Supreme Court to reverse the decision of a King County circuit court judge that allowed a recall effort to move forward against her, which could result in her expulsion from office.

Durkan, a Democrat, was called out by five Seattle residents who filed a petition seeking to recall her because of how law enforcement officials have responded to protests this summer, according to The Seattle Times.

The city council there may be violating the consent decree with the federal government regarding police staffing and practices, and dating to 2012, but they don’t seem to care. Laws based on a fundamentally racist country are invalid, dontcha know. They’re presiding over the death of Seattle so they can fundamentally transform it. If it’s a deadly, crime-ridden hellhole along the way and after the transformation is complete, well, you’ve heard the saying about omelets and eggs.

Police Chief Carmen Best’s Resignation Email Shows She’s the Adult in the Room

New York, New York

“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,” Sinatra once crooned of the city that never sleeps. Now New York is the city that always bleeds: shootings and murders are way up, formerly busy shops on once clean streets are hit by looters, boarded up by mandates, and occupied by the homeless and criminals. Residents are deciding now is the time to make it somewhere — anywhere — else. New York just isn’t worth it anymore.

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New York City was, until very recently, the safest large city in America. It earned that status by working hard over the course of many years and more than one mayor to clean up its act. New York backed the NYPD blue.

One mayor has undone all of that progress. Now it’s dying. New York’s rotten Marxist Mayor Bill de Blasio is seeing to a police defunding and demoralization program, and its citizens who can afford to, are seeing to a hasty exit.

“People are fleeing the city in droves,” says Moon Salahie, owner of Elite Moving & Storing in Yonkers, who has been working nonstop since the city began Phase 1 of its reopening in June.

Salahie said 90 percent of the moves are to the suburbs and mostly families with kids worried about the school year. He’s packed people out of neighborhoods all over Manhattan.

“The least movement would be the Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue crowds,” he said. “Those people don’t have to leave because they have second homes.”

The rich can go. The rest suffer. It’s up to you, New York, to save yourself. But about a half a million and probably a lot more of you have already left town. So who’s left and what will they save?

The saddest part of all this, aside from the rape and murder sprees these and other cities will suffer now, is the fact that none of the current leaders in them see the mayhem to come as a failure. They really don’t.

It’s all a means to an end as they swing their hammer (and sickle) at the system they want to smash.

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