Austin's Mayor Adler Defunded Police, and Crime Shot Up 200%. GMA Lets Him Pretend It's Not His Fault.

Austin’s Mayor Steve Adler is positively diabolical.

The mayor appeared on national TV Wednesday with a set-up that included the hard fact that crime has shot up 200% in Austin.

The anchors, as usual for the mainstream media, set Adler up to not answer for his decision to defund police. This allowed Adler to dodge direct blame for a crime issue he and fellow city council members, including the radical Greg Casar, caused and continue to abet.

T.J. Holmes: And as Amy just mentioned a moment ago, crime being up 200% in your city. We are talking about also 10 mass shootings we’ve seen in the country just since Friday, 200 in 2021. I guess we could expect some uptick once people started coming back out and we started opening back up – but is something else at play, in your opinion?

Adler: “Has to be, has to be. And it doesn’t look like it’s tied to local policies or decisions because it’s happening across the country.

Let’s stop the tape. Crime is spiking hard in Democrat-run cities across the country, many of which defunded their police and then proceeded to demoralize them. Austin is not only not an exception to this, it led the way with one of the nation’s largest defuding efforts. Adler led the city council to gut the police budget by about $150 million, a third of its budget. The cuts included key community policing and intelligence units.

What on earth did he expect would happen when he led defunding of the city’s police? Why hasn’t anyone in the mainstream media asked him how he expected defunding to play out, versus what’s actually happened?

Why don’t the anchors ask him about a) defunding, and b) the consequences of defunding?

Their failure to ask obvious questions is among the reasons Americans’ trust in the media is the lowest in the world (excluding China, where answering honestly will get you sent to labor camp with the Uighurs, and Russia, where answering honestly will get you poisoned).

Robach: Yeah, there is something happening for sure. That’s undeniable. I know you met with mayors across this country and you, along with mayors from Dayton, Chicago, Houston, Savannah, demanded President Biden take action to do something about this massive uptick in gun violence. He is expected to make an announcement later today [June 23]. What are you hoping to see and hear from President Biden?

Adler: “Well, I’m excited to see the attention and the increased focus on this issue because it is real. Cities, communities across the country need additional resources, with local law enforcement to be able to find these illegal weapons. We need more help with red flag laws across the country to prevent people that shouldn’t have weapons [from] getting them. There’s low-hanging fruit here, and reasonable gun regulation has wide support across the country and we need to take advantage of those things. Additional funding for community violence intervention efforts, additional money in helping kids find jobs. There’s a lot that the president could do that would be really helpful.”

Blah blah blah. That is not a question, that is a media set-up to allow a politico to blather rather than answer. The viewer learns nothing useful from such an exchange, but that’s no longer the point of the mainstream media. This interview is literally Democrat PR masquerading as media, nothing more or less.

Red flag laws are probably constitutionally problematic. Adler isn’t asked about this. How the new gun measures he wants can be enforced after he gutted the police budget is also not asked. He isn’t asked for any substance at all, just the usual platitudes.

Holmes: You talk about what can be helpful, but you also said a moment ago that we have to figure out what’s going on and what’s at the root of it. Can you really solve the problem if you don’t exactly know what’s causing it? Right? You take some guns away, we provide jobs and I guess that could help – but unless we figure it out, do you think we’re at a disadvantage still by trying to solve a problem we really don’t know the cause of?

Adler: “Huge disadvantage. And that’s why, again, we point to the fact that it’s happening everywhere. You know, cities across the country are really focusing on local policies and they’re going to get lost if they do that in terms of being able to identify what the real cause of this is. But you’re absolutely right. We have to be able to identify that. In the meantime though, we can treat some of the symptoms. We know there are too many illegal guns being trafficked, whether they’re showing up in crimes with increased frequency. We need to figure out what’s going on and until we do that, we’re not going to be able to be most effective. But as we’re doing that, we have to address the symptoms we see.

Again, nothing about the actions Adler has taken in office, and what resulted from those actions, versus what he expected. Again, this is why Americans just don’t trust the media. They’re almost as bad at their job as Adler is at his.

Steve Adler is probably the most incompetent mayor in Austin’s history. He lets his ideology blind him to obvious facts and the nature of how actions beget consequences. New York’s Bill de Blasio is arguably more incompetent, and you’d have to put Portland’s trust-fund kid Ted Wheeler, Seattle’s Jenny Durkan, and Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot in the conversation, but Adler gives them all a run for the prize. He’d have been worse if the Texas legislature and governor hadn’t been breathing down his neck. Put him in a blue city in a blue state and he’d run amok with lethally stupid policies.

They’re all awful and have demonstrably left their cities worse off than when they took office. Adler has left Austin with a badly weakened police department and crime that’s double last year. He should be asked about this, not just given a platform for leftist pabulum.

In interviews such as this one, the media do no one any favors — certainly not viewers and not even Adler, who’s probably happy he got out without being asked any real questions. He also wasn’t challenged on his policies, and probably walks away thinking he’s really right about all this.

He’s not. He’s self-righteous in his rigid ideology but he’s wrong. People in the city that elected him are getting hurt and killed because he’s awful. He doesn’t have the first clue about reality and the harm he is causing to real people.

Media failures to report the facts or challenge him do nothing to change that.